Has anything been more edifying over recent years than the sight of Hugh Grant inexorably becoming more and more Hugh Grantish? I put it to you that it hasn’t. Witness Grant at the Oscars this month, blurting out a tommy-gun burst of charismatic anti-answers to a bewildered host simply because he didn’t want to engage with her softball line of questioning, for example. It was a moment of forced awkwardness that you simply don’t see any more.
Nor was it a one-off. This week, on Stephen Colbert’s talkshow, Grant launched into another berserk theory that has no real place existing in the modern world: telephones have ruined the film set.
Ostensibly there to promote his new Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves movie, but really just there as a sort of warped Borat-style performance art stunt about a profoundly Eeyorish actor who really can’t be bothered with any of this, Grant told Colbert that he didn’t really enjoy acting any more because: “In the old days, by the end of the second week, you were all getting drunk in the evening and having dinner and falling in love with each other and all that. And all that stopped because of telephones. Really, everyone goes home and looks at Twitter. It’s so sad”.
Which, as a statement, is just perfect. It’s railing against technology. It’s railing about change. It paints a picture of Grant standing around by his trailer at the end of the day, urging all his castmates to come and get drunk with him, and all of them giving him a wide berth. It is the sort of thing a middle-aged dad would say in public specifically to make his teenage children feel awkward.
In truth, the outburst did double as a kind of open invitation to be cast in Quentin Tarantino’s final movie – “Tarantino bans telephones from sets and quite right too, and the people there, they do all shag each other”, he told Colbert – but this probably isn’t what we should be focusing on. What should be catching our attention is the fact that Hugh Grant simply doesn’t care any more. He has given up trying to maintain the pretty-boy leading man image of the 1990s, and has chosen instead to let us marvel at the weird crevices of his mind. His skin has finally been shed, his true image has now been revealed and this deserves to be celebrated.
We have had hints of this professionally, of course. When Hugh Grant turned up in the Wachowskis’ underrated Cloud Atlas – swaddled in prosthetics to variously play someone who looks like Elon Musk, someone who looks like Noddy Holder and a full-blown tribal chief – it hinted at a man who wanted to break free of the prison of a million romcoms. What was Paddington 2 if not an entire movie built around Hugh Grant breaking free of his cocoon and emerging as an incredibly weird butterfly? Why would anyone possibly refer to themselves as ‘basically a scrotum’ during a live Oscars telecast – as Grant did mere weeks ago – unless they were actively inviting weirdness upon themselves.
This, you feel, is the Hugh Grant that has always lurked under the skin. This is the grumpy, sullen, socially awkward character actor who he has always longed to be. Who knows what the future holds for this strange, lumpen, counterproductive persona now that it exists in the world? Hopefully this is just the start. In years to come we’ll watch in awe as Hugh Grant plays a succession of grotesque caricatures that fill the margins of work by the greatest directors, then we’ll cover our eyes as he promotes these movies by babbling the first inappropriate thought that crosses his mind.
It will be amazing, and I’m being sincere here. At the cinema last week, I watched a Dungeons & Dragons trailer where the cast sat in a row and introduced the film as themselves. Hugh Grant spent the trailer way out on the far side of the row, grinning petulantly as if he couldn’t wait to cut loose and tell everyone how stupid the film was. Waiting for his outburst was the most excited I’ve been in a cinema this year. When it didn’t come, I was brokenhearted.
But this is the world that Hugh Grant has created for himself now. All bets are off. The man can do whatever he likes now, and it is glorious. Oh, and Quentin Tarantino really should hire him, too.
