Hugh Grant thinks people were ‘repelled’ by his public persona in the 1990s, which he says morphed more and more into the parts he played – and further away from the real Grant.
The 64-year-old actor’s breakthrough role came in Richard Curtis’ 1994 film Four Weddings and A Funeral, and after finding further success as the flustered heartthrob in later rom-coms like Notting Hill, Love Actually and Music and Lyrics, he started to adopt the character in real life.
But he started to hate pretending to be the sweet ‘stutter-y, blink-y’ onscreen charmer everyone knew, branding himself a ‘d**k’ for keeping up the pretence.
‘People quite rightly were repelled by it in the end,’ he said of his real-life performance in a new interview.
While he became typecast for a while, the Wonka star – who has recently thrilled critics with his turn in horror film Heretic – admitted the parts were ‘actually character roles’ because they are a world away from the real man.
He explained to Vanity Fair magazine: ‘The irony of the Richard Curtis parts I played is that they were actually character roles for me – I’m not that stutter-y, blink-y guy.
‘The catastrophic mistake I made was that because Four Weddings was such a gigantic success, I thought, “Oh well, this is the way of infinite wealth and success. People are eating up that person.”’
From there, Grant decided to adopt the persona at award shows and in interviews but had choice words for himself now for doing so.
He added: ‘In my Golden Globe acceptance speech from 1995, I said, “I love you, gosh, blah blah. Thank you so much”- what a d**k.’
‘I’m playing the character because I thought everyone was eating him up. It was never me at all.’
However, being in the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, where he portrayed six characters including a cannibal chief and a plantation owner, reminded him of his initial love for performance – joking that he’d remembered ‘in fact, I almost used to enjoy acting’.
The actor recalled that he’d ‘started out doing silly voices, odd people, making people laugh at university, and then doing this comedy show in London, with everything being based around ‘doing characters’.
However, ‘through sheer chance, maybe because of the way I looked, I got drawn into the leading romantic hero’, which he called ‘fine’, but ‘not what I think I’m best at’.
As with many actors over the years he confirmed the general feeling that playing lead roles is ‘less fun’.
In the same interview, Grant – who is reprising his role as the caddish but dashing love rat Daniel Cleaver for the fourth Bridget Jones film – revealed that he actually rewrote ‘some scenes’ for his part.
He did not reprise his role in the last film, 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, where his character appeared to be killed off, because he felt that Daniel ‘just didn’t belong, so I stepped aside’.
But having ‘loved the script’ this time around – which made him cry – he helped figure things out after admitting the draft of the script he read had seen them ‘[do] something I wasn’t crazy about’ with his character.
The actor has previously won a best acting Bafta for Four Weddings And A Funeral, and been given nominations for supporting actor for Paddington 2 and Florence Foster Jenkins.
He received a leading actor nod for the TV awards for his role in A Very English Scandal.
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