Hugh Grant Explained Why He Isn't Doing Rom-Coms Anymore
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If you're waiting to see a girl stand in front of a boy, telling him that she loves him, you could be waiting a while. In a new roundtable discussion with The Hollywood Reporter, '90s rom-com staple Hugh Grant says that he's through with the genre that made him a household name. Grant ruled the silver screen with flicks such as Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and, of course, Love, Actually. But as the sun started to set, casting a golden-hour glow over his career, he pivoted away from romantic comedies. Now, we know why.
"I've gotten too old and ugly and fat to do them anymore," he said. "So now I've done other things and I've got marginally less self-hatred."
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Grant looks back on the time fondly, however. He said that being in back-to-back-to-back rom-coms paid handsomely. Plus, he notes that he has the unique opportunity to look back on his body of work and not really have any regrets. He says that it's his job to entertain, so if the people want meet-cutes, proclamations of love, and rain-soaked kisses, he was going to give viewers exactly what they paid for.
"I was being paid tons of money. I was very lucky," he continued. "And most of those romantic comedies I can look squarely in the face — one or two are shockers, but on the whole, I can look them in the face and people like them. And I am a big believer that our job is to entertain. It's not to practice some weird, quasi-religious experience."
But if he could do it all over again, he insists that he would. It all goes back to the time after Four Weddings and a Funeral. Grant explained that he had the chance to move into meatier roles, but instead of doing that, he just kept on rolling. It wasn't until recently, when he appeared in the series A Very English Scandal along with the movies Cloud Atlas and The Gentlemen that he got into more serious roles. Well, serious roles along with Paddington 2.
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"Every decision I ever made was probably wrong," he said. "After Four Weddings, and the world was my oyster, I should've made interesting decisions and done different stuff. Instead, I repeated myself almost identically about 17 times in a row."
Fans of the classic rom-com don't have to wait long to see Grant dip his toes back into the pool. Even though he insists that he won't be headlining a good old-fashioned romantic comedy anytime soon, he did reunite with his Love, Actually cast for a Red Nose Day charity special and will do it all over again with Four Weddings, which will be an anthology series helmed by romance connoisseur Mindy Kaling, no less.
"We shot a 14-minute little sequelette," Grant revealed at the 2019 Screen Actors Guild Awards. "I'll tell you what, everyone who was asked from the original film said yes and turned up and we all look pretty ropy now, but we're all good sports. We did it."
