Hugh Grant has revealed he fooled the public with his charming persona (Picture: REX/Shutterstock)
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.
Grant broke through with his role in 1994’s Four Weddings and A Funeral (Picture: MGM/AccuSoft Inc)
He was hugely popular too as the lead in Notting Hill, leading the actor to adopt the same persona (Picture: Moviestore/Shutterstock)
‘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.’
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‘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, he fell back in love with acting thanks to Cloud Atlas (Picture: Warner Bros/Jay Maidment)
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 …read more
Source:: Metro
