Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
IF YOU’RE 60 WITH FIVE SMALL CHILDREN, YOU CAN’T HAVE A HANGOVER!
Back on TV in a gripping new thriller with Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant tells why he’s glad he’s no longer a scary old golf-addicted bachelor...
As he grows older, Hugh Grant’s roles have become noticeably darker. Two years ago he gave us a thoroughly seedy toff in TV’S take on Jeremy Thorpe, A Very English Scandal, and he’s currently on the big screen playing a far-from-gentlemanly private investigator in Guy Ritchie’s latest crime caper The Gentlemen. Next he’ll be back on television alongside Nicole Kidman in the role of Jonathan Fraser, a children’s oncologist with a dark secret in The Undoing.
It’s fair to say that both Thorpe and Dr Fraser are a far cry from the foppish characters he played in Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to Richard Curtis about this, but he always found it hilarious that the public might think I really was that nice guy in his films, because he knew very differently,’ Hugh tells me when we meet in New York. ‘That was a real bit of character acting, because that Mr Nice Guy’s never been me.’
It’s hard to imagine the bumbling, lovestruck Charles from Four Weddings in 1994 turning 60, as Hugh did earlier this month. The notion amuses him. ‘I’m shedding hair, not pounds,’ he jokes. What’s left of it has now acquired a salt and pepper hue and his face is a touch jowlier than it used to be, which would make it difficult for him to play romantic leads even if he wanted to.
‘I do find that as I grow older I’m increasingly drawn to, and more comfortable in, revolting roles,’ he says. ‘The more revolting the better. The camera is a very odd thing in that it’s a little bit like a lie detector. It can sort of smell out truths you didn’t even know existed. One of the things it loves is evil in human beings, because under the very thin veneer of civilisation we all have some evil in there.
‘You look at some of the great films by people like Tarantino or Scorsese and you wonder, “Why are we enjoying them so much?” The answer is because they touch on something very real about all of us. So when you play someone who’s pretty unpleasant you’re already working with a reality that the camera likes. And that’s what makes playing nice guys much harder than playing bad guys.’
He once told me, with some frustration, ‘People have seemed to think I can only play one sort of character. That’s not the case. When I started acting in the 80s I did this comedy show that was all silly voices, so yes, I’ve gnashed my teeth over the years because I can do different things if I’m allowed to.’
He’s proved that by pulling off the bad guy (albeit a panto one) with aplomb as tap-dancing ex-actor
Phoenix Buchanan in 2017’s acclaimed Paddington 2, and as rakish Daniel Cleaver in two Bridget Jones films – although he pulled out of the final instalment Bridget Jones’s Baby because the script wasn’t to his liking. But there have been flops too. Ambitious sci-fi spectacular Cloud Atlas, in which he played six characters, bombed spectacularly in 2012.
None of this has harmed his bank balance of course. ‘Money’s lovely,’ he says. ‘Particularly for me because, despite my sounding the way I do, I didn’t grow up rich or privileged. I know my voice is confusing, but my background was not a privileged one: my family weren’t seriously poor, but we weren’t rich by any means. We didn’t have holidays abroad or anything like that – I didn’t even go on an aeroplane until I was in my twenties.
‘I remember the first job I had – I earned £21 for cleaning the lavatories in a pub and I thought it was a fortune. I’d spread out the notes in a rosette on the floor and marvel at my new-found wealth. So for me to earn a bit of money now has been nice. I don’t think you should ever do anything just for the money though. One of the few things I’ve learned in life is that if you do, it does comes back to bite you in the end. But the privilege that comes with being comfortably off is not to be underestimated – not to have to worry about paying the gas bill is massive and it still remains massive all these years later.’
His gas bills must be considerable these days. In September 2011 his then-girlfriend Tinglan Hong, a receptionist, gave birth to his daughter Tabitha. Four children and a wedding later he’s now a father of five and effectively running two families. A year after Tabitha was born he had a son, John, with Swedishborn TV producer Anna Eberstein. The following year he broke up with Anna and reunited with Tinglan, with whom he had Felix. ‘I’ve been having a child every Thursday recently,’ he remarked dryly at the time. In December 2015, now back with Anna, he had his fourth, a second girl, whose name has not been revealed. He and Anna then had another child, also so far unnamed in public, in early 2018 and married in May of that year.
Tinglan and her two live in a house he reportedly bought for her for more than £1,000,000, close to the Chelsea
townhouse he shares with Anna and his other three. He and Anna have spent an estimated £500,000 on a holiday home in the picturesque village of Torekov on the south coast of Sweden which he is firm will be for summer use only, since ‘as I understand it, Sweden is only habitable for one month of the year.’
He says he’s having the time of his life as a family man. ‘It’s just damned nice, isn’t it? I hadn’t realised what a long gap I’d had between leaving one family when I left my parents’ home at 19, and then having another one, which only happened a few years ago. You do sort of need a family, I get that now.
‘I think I’d turned into a slightly scary old golf-addicted bachelor, and to tell you the truth I’m glad to see the back of him. I mean, it’s completely knackering trying to be a young father in an old man’s body, and I’ve found that if you’re 60 and there are five small children in the house you can’t have a hangover either. But it’s worth it. Absolutely.
‘We went on a very good London ghost tour recently because one of my children was obsessed with
ghosts, and to my astonishment it began at a house my then-girlfriend and I had looked at about 15 years ago with a view to buying. We both came out saying, “Oh no, there’s something very wrong with that place.” She claimed to have seen a figure moving through a mirror and there was a very strange atmosphere. We didn’t know then what I learned on the tour, which is that it’s apparently the No 1 haunted house in London! I quite like all that stuff, although it’s giving me goosebumps to think about it now.’
On set Hugh is said to be a perfectionist, demanding multiple takes until he’s happy, and this has led to tensions with some of his co-stars. Robert Downey Jr called him a ‘boring, flash-in-the-pan a**hole Brit’ after they finished filming the historical drama Restoration in 1995, and after working with Drew Barrymore on the rom-com Music And Lyrics in 2007 he said, ‘I think Drew did hate me a bit.’
But he believes he’s mellowed over the past decade. He was over 50 when he had his first child, and
his career has certainly thrived since. ‘People say to me, “You’ve got better as an actor in the last ten years. Why?” And I sometimes think it may be because of the kids. It’s a whole new experience for me because I feel opened up inside and much less hidebound.’
Which brings us back to his new-found fondness for television, a medium he’s long held a prejudice against. ‘Well, it has everything to offer these days, hasn’t it?’ he says. ‘I think I’m the last person alive who’s snobbish about it, but I can’t complain about anything with The Undoing.’
The tense mini-series, loosely based on the bestselling novel You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, is about an apparently happy marriage that falls apart when the husband is suspected of murder. Nicole appears as Grace, a successful therapist on the brink of publishing her first book who has a devoted husband and a young son at an elite private school in New York. But weeks before her book is published there’s a violent death and her husband goes missing, leading to a chain of terrible revelations.
Hugh’s unwilling to say too much about his latest character for fear of spoiling the plot. ‘You’ll enjoy it though,’ he nods. ‘It’s brilliant Scandinoir. It’s got marvellous writers, actors and directors. I was working with Nicole Kidman, who’s multi-oscar nominated, and you can’t get much filmier than Donald Sutherland. It was an astonishing experience.’
As was his time on A Very English Scandal, the three-part series that was the TV hit of 2018 and earned him Golden Globe, Emmy and BAFTA nominations. While filming the drama in London he surprised fellow cast members by getting around on his scooter, anonymous under his helmet (although he was pictured picking up a parking ticket).
Meanwhile, he’s just enjoyed his 60th birthday. ‘I have friends who always make me have a party – one in particular fixes a party for me whether I want one or not. One of his tricks is to invite people who’ve done terrible things to me, so he’ll say, “Hugh, here’s Ted, he burgled your flat in 1995.” And I’m too polite to say, “Get the f**k out,” so I’m left saying, “Hello! Come on in Ted, make yourself at home, I... uhm, imagine you already know where everything is kept...”’
So what of the future? ‘I’m always slightly envious of the way the writer Vladimir Nabokov ended his life. When he finally made some money he spent the last ten or 20 years living with his wife in a grand hotel on Lake Geneva. I can see myself doing that too, looking out over the lake and catching butterflies, and the children coming to visit my wife and me. It would be rather lovely, I think.’