Hugh Grant Reveals He Recovered from COVID Earlier This Year, Recalls 'Embarrassing' Symptoms
Hugh Grant is opening up about battling the coronavirus.
During a virtual appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night, the 60-year-old actor revealed that he recovered from COVID-19 earlier this year. Grant said that an antibodies test he took last month came back positive, and he estimates he and wife Anna Eberstein contracted the coronavirus back in February.
"It started as just a very strange syndrome where I kept breaking into a terrible sweat. It was like a poncho of sweat, embarrassing really," recalled Grant. "Then my eyeballs felt about three sizes too big and this feeling as though some enormous man was sitting on my chest, sort of Harvey Weinstein or someone."
"I thought, 'I don't know what this is,' and then I was walking down the street one day and I though, 'I can't smell a damn thing,' and you start to panic," he added.
Grant said he began "sniffing flowers" to be certain he had the telltale symptom, and still couldn't pick up a scent. "And you get more and more desperate — I started sniffing in garbage cans. You know, you want to sniff strangers' armpits because you just can't smell anything."
"I eventually went home and sprayed my wife's Chanel No. 5 directly into my face. Couldn't smell a thing, but I did go blind!" he joked.
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Grant, who stars opposite Nicole Kidman in the new HBO thriller The Undoing, opened up last month about quarantining with his young kids and how he had "learned to cut hair" to pass the time — starting small.
"I started by cutting my daughter's Barbie's hair out of sheer boredom, and I discovered I was extremely talented," he told Good Morning America at the time. "Then I started cutting my children's hair, whether they wanted a haircut or not. I just strapped them to a chair and cut their hair."
Elaborating on how he rates himself as an overall dad, Grant quipped, "I would say I'm enchanting, but I don't know what the children would say."
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"I do have some of my dad's traits," the Love Actually star continued. "He was ex-Army — and lovely, lovely — but suddenly, out of nowhere, the most terrifying bark would come. And I notice I do that. It makes all the kids cry. It makes my wife cry. It makes the neighbors cry."
Grant is dad to son Felix Chang, 7½, and daughter Tabitha Xaio Xi, 9, with ex Tinglan Hong, as well as a 2½-year-old, a 4½-year-old daughter and son John Mungo, 8, with wife Eberstein, whom he married in May 2018.
"I have no complaints; I'm one of the lucky ones," he said on GMA. "Having said that, I'm quite old and my children are very young and I can't say that's entirely easy."
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