I won’t do any more romcoms – I’m too old and ugly, says Hugh, 57
HIS floppy hair and chiselled good looks have always made him dashing leading man material.
But these days Hugh Grant, who made his name in hits such as Four Weddings and Funeral, Notting Hill and the Bridget Jones movies, says he steers clear of such roles.
At 57, he says he is too ‘old and ugly’ for romantic comedies and insists ‘the bird has flown’.
Instead, he is moving in a different direction – such as playing Jeremy Thorpe, the disgraced former Liberal leader, in A Very English Scandal. ‘I’ve always tried to take whatever was the most entertaining thing in front of me at the time,’ he told the Radio Times. ‘And getting older and uglier has made the parts, you know, more varied. There used to be quite a big snobbery about ‘‘Oh, I’m a film star now, I don’t do television”. But that is eroding very fast. I saw De Niro is now doing television.’
Grant, a father of five, says he had to lose weight to portray Thorpe’s hollow- cheeked appearance in the drama, which will start on BBC1 on Sunday. ‘I just got thinner. He was cadaverous, Thorpe, so I bought a bicycle and went racing round Richmond Park for four months and lost quite a lot of weight.’
He said playing the old Etonian, who stood trial in 1979 for conspiracy to murder his gay ex-lover Norman Scott, also required a ‘genius’ make-up artist. ‘He knew exactly what to do,’ he said. ‘Clever stuff like making my cheekbones even more hollow, the contact lenses and the hair.’