After four decades in Hollywood, Hugh Grant can’t resist getting in a dig or two about some of his most beloved roles. During a recent appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, the 62-year-old actor declared, “I would happily shred my IMDB page” because he “specialized in being bad for decades, really.”
Grant has supported that statement on his Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves press tour, never missing an opportunity to get grumpy about some of his most famous projects—and the industry in general.
Following his awkward Oscars interview with Ashley Graham, Grant criticized his co-star Drew Barrymore’s singing abilities in their 2007 romantic comedy, Music and Lyrics. “Her singing is just horrendous,” Grant laughed in a Wired video interview. “I’ve heard dogs bark better than she sings.” To be fair, he also slammed his own vocal prowess, saying that though he wasn’t auto-tuned “as much” as Barrymore, she still wound up sounding “way better” than he did.
For the record, Grant had less harsh words for Barrymore on her talk show in 2021, “I love to hate the films I’ve been in, and I do hate some of them. But Music and Lyrics, it’s impossible to hate. We’re so good in it, and so charming.” Barrymore also defended Grant for maligning her singing this month, telling her talk show audience: “If you know Hugh, like, that is his way of loving you.”
Elsewhere in the news cycle, Grant has spoken ill about his famous Love Actually dancing scene: “I dreaded that,” he told Entertainment Tonight. He also said he thought Four Weddings and a Funeral was “a giant turkey till the film had its first previews” in a statement to IndieWire; called Notting Hill’s ending “nauseating” because it shows his character reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the book that would be adapted into director Roger Michell’s next project; and told an actually sickening story from the set of Two Weeks Notice, where he ingested four Coney Island hot dogs before they “blew my ass out,” Grant said on The Late Late Show.
In the same late-night interview, Grant was asked which title he’d expunge from his résumé if given the chance. “As you know as someone in the industry, [it’s] one thing for me to say I was bad, but I can’t bring down the rest of the wonderful colleagues who work with me on any film by saying it was bad,” Grant began, before doing just that. He named 1988’s made-for-TV movie, The Lady and the Highwayman. “I’m a highwayman. I’m meant to be sexy,” Grant explained, adding, “Low-budget, bad wig, bad hat.”
On top of all that moviemaking mystery, Grant has also maligned the loss of a good on-set romance, calling current film sets “so weird” while on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “You know, 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,” Grant told Colbert. “And all that stopped because of telephones. Really, everyone goes home and looks at Twitter. It’s so sad.”
Pour one out for Hugh Grant—perhaps the most curmudgeonly leading man to ever have a meet-cute.