Hugh Grant says ‘Notting Hill’ character is ‘despicable’, has no ‘balls’

You’d think that starring in one of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time would help you in the dating department. But Hugh Grant says so Notting Hill has only given him trouble.

“When I’m flipping through the channels at home after a few drinks and this comes on, I just think, Why does my character have no balls?” he said recently Vanity Fair. “There’s a scene in this movie where she’s in my house and paps comes to the front door and rings the bell and I think I just let her walk past me and open the door. It’s horrible.”

The scene in question from the Richard Curtis-penned rom-com classic finds actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) besieged by paparazzi at the apartment of Grant’s character William Thacker, with whom she has shared an on-again off-again romance that is recently. been through a big off period. Ever since they broke up six months earlier, Thacker has longed for Scott, dwelling on what he could have done differently to keep her in his life. Then she shows up again and he just lets her go again.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend, or actually now wife, who hasn’t said, ‘Why the hell didn’t you stop her? What’s wrong with you?'” Grant said. “And I don’t really have an answer to that — that’s the way it was written. And I think he’s despicable, really.”

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Grant made his name on rom-coms as Four weddings and a funeral and Nine months. On time Notting Hill come together in 1999, his star persona was fully associated with the genre, or at least broadly with romance, including his roles in period romances such as Sense and Sensibility and Maurice.

But after Notting Hill led to a slew of successful rom-coms in the early 2000s – Bridget Jones film, Two weeks noticeand the perennial Christmas season must see Love actually — Grant more or less left the genre behind. The last out-and-out romantic comedy he starred in was 2014’s The paraphrasewhose reception paled in comparison Notting Hill and Bridget Jones movies of yesteryear.

However, lack of good material or faltering success in rom-com roles is not what broke his streak. Grant broke it himself. In the past few years, he has gone on record numerous times to express his distaste, even disgust for the genre, with Notting Hill be a definite goal.

He was “sure” that all his previous rom-com relationships would now be “all disasters. Those movies were all lies,” he shared Collider in 2020. “I am sure that my character in Notting Hill and Julia Roberts’ character has been through the nastiest divorce imaginable with really expensive, nasty lawyers.”

He told Wired the end of the movie “nauseous”, said during a press release for a recent film that “the whole idea that a man and a woman belong together” is a “big fat lie” and when asked while promoting thriller series The regret if he ever wants to do another rom-com, the BAFTA winner replied, “I’d like to do a sequel to one of my own romantic comedies that shows what happened after those movies ended…to prove the terrible lie that they all were: that it was a happy ending.”

“I want to do me and Julia and the nasty divorce that followed with really expensive lawyers, kids involved in (a) love affair, floods of tears. Psychologically scarred forever,” he continued in his mischievous style.

Roberts has expressed his own mixed feelings about Notting Hilland told Curtis earlier this year that “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was your movie, where you played a movie actress.” She recalled being “so uncomfortable” that she “almost didn’t take the part because it just seemed—oh, it just seemed so awkward. I didn’t even know how to play that person.”

On that point, Grant gallantly disagrees. Despite his poison for his own Notting Hill character, he told Vanity Fair that “all the time with Julia, as with any brilliant actress, you just think, Oh God, they are really good, I won’t be as good as her. She’s great at emoting, and she has that kind of quality where it seems like her skin is thin, so you can see her soul.”