~unlocked essay~ On Hugh Grant
AN ODE TO ONE OF THE MOST CHARMING LEADING MEN
Unlocking this essay for everyone to read! I’ve loved Hugh’s answers to the Proust Questionnaire over at Vanity Fair. His press run for Heretic has been delicious. I definitely called it earlier this year… the Hugh renaissance is upon us. I’ll always love a movie star with CHARACTER, EDGE and DRY WIT… Enjoy!
By the way, a new Voice Note to come this weekend for Paid Subscribers.
In the last couple of years I have been engaging in a little bout of screenwriting when I’m not engaging in a little bit of fraught novel-writing. When it comes to formats and genres, I have a habit of unraveling what makes them work. Similar to someone taking apart a clock and putting it back together, it gives me a sense of what it takes to see the big picture.
I have always leaned towards screwballs and romantic comedies. I like the simple setup of a war of the sexes or “will they, won’t they”. As I was unbraiding the ingredients of my favourite films while also trying to create a good male romantic lead, it struck me how few actors could achieve what Hugh Grant has done so consistently over his career. Perhaps this may be him working with a good script, but a cursory glance over his oeuvre makes clear it’s definitely… him.
True to the classic form, a male romantic comedy lead should first appear a little detestable...or in Grant’s early roles incapable, helpless, clumsy. They can’t be entirely repugnant because our heroine (and us!) must eventually fall in love with them. The easiest way contemporary films do this is often showing the man as an archetype of bad masculinity (emotionally closed? a capitalist i.e. You’ve Got Mail, Two Weeks Notice? Flying too close to misogyny? Can’t take care of themselves (so, a baby)? A heartbroken chump?).
Hugh’s characters embody something that is integral to a romantic comedy and I would venture even in courtship. It is the sense that he is changeable. He is a cad, but not in any serious way (Bridget Jones’s). He is a coward, but under the right circumstance (love) he can be brave (Notting Hill). He’s not terminally bad, he’s just a touch misguided. His manner breeds optimism about the possibility of alteration in the near future. In his performances, there are unmistakeable idiosyncrasies. The stutter, the grin, the way he performs his lines as if he truly does not know what he will say next. I will admit, I have never seen a man wear a button up shirt with such flair, joie de vivre, and a certain je ne sais quoi.
The words “foppish” and “affable” get thrown around a lot in writing on Hugh Grant, and then of course, mention of his early career hair. He carved a niche for himself as the platonic ideal of a handsome, self-effacing British man. Bridget Jones’s played Colin Firth and Grant against each other perfectly, as Firth always comes off as a little too noble and self-serious. He plays straight, while Grant is given license to play in any direction. It makes sense then, that the reason there was a sequel and then… most terribly a third film (that Hugh declined to be in), is because Hugh Grant’s performance left the opportunity between Daniel Cleaver and Bridget open. For some fans, this left them hopeful that the bad boy could be tamed.
As a young man from a fairly good family Hugh attended Oxford to study English Literature and went on to try his hand at a PHD in Art History at The Courtauld. Without a grant to pursue the PHD, he “failed into” acting after having been part of Oxford’s drama club as a fun little hobby. I love stories of people going to school for something completely unrelated to what they do now… like Nigella Lawson going to Oxford for Medieval and Modern Languages… I recall her once calling a chocolate cake tasting “celestial” and this only made sense after hearing about her degree.
Roués
I’ve been taken by this particular archetype recently that has been coming up time and time again. Rupert Everett and Hugh Grant have always made me feel very Picture of Dorian Gray, especially when they were young. They look as if they were drawn from Oscar Wilde’s imagination of what a Dandy should be.
I put together a few characters recently that all feel tonally similar (Daniel Day Lewis in Phantom Thread, Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things, Ralph Fiennes in Grand Budapest Hotel, Bradley Cooper in Maestro). I posted this on Instagram and asked what we should call this… One writer wrote to me saying a “straight homosexual”, A.S. Hamrah said “a Roué”, and I added in “a Rake”. In a Vogue profile from 1999, the writer describes Hugh Grant as "foppish, floppy-haired, perennially tongue-tied upper-class Englishman,” and later says Hugh is a “handsome heterosexual film star who occasionally lapses into the mannerisms of a homosexual heart throb.”1
Roué’s definition spans from “A man who recklessly indulges in sensual pleasures” to “a dissolute and licentious man,” of which I wish to have a word that could be the feminine equivalent that sounds just as much FUN.
You might be too young to know this, but in 1999 Hugh Grant was caught with sex worker Divine Brown, driving on Sunset Boulevard while receiving oral sex. This was such a scandal at the time and yet(!) it was the same year Notting Hill had come out. Judging from his filmography post-scandal, I think it helped Hugh have roles that had a little more devil to them, steering away from the clumsy, diffident roles like Four Weddings and a Funeral.
If you want to see Hugh Grant in top form, pre-romantic comedy reign, I urge you to watch Maurice (1987) directed by James Ivory… A beautiful love story about two queer men in Edwardian England who met at Cambridge (of course). I often think about what roles Rupert Everett would have been offered if he hadn’t have come out in 1989… Hollywood just couldn’t handle it. I think in another, better world, Rupert would have stolen the crown off Hugh. Rupert has good humour about this, “If I'd been straight? I'd be doing what Colin [Firth] and Hugh [Grant] do, I suppose.” His only complaint being so classically Dandy-esque, “I'd like to be Hugh Grant in that I suppose I'd like to be selling my Andy Warhol for $36m or whatever he sold his for, or buying a Francis Bacon.”2
Legacy
People don’t realize how the British tabloids of the 90s terrorized Hugh Grant and long-time girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley. It was the wild west, full of private investigators tapping people’s phones, breaking into their apartments, and photographing people in compromising situations.
Now, whenever Grant makes headlines it’s for his curmudgeonly interviews. When he said he “couldn’t have hated” filming Willy Wonka more, he was complaining about the use of CGI and having to wear a suit that felt like a “crown of thorns” to capture his body movements. He wasn’t sure if he should “act with my body or not, and I never received a satisfactory answer.” It is embarrassing to think of what we do to our stars when instead of a set, they are acting on a green screen.
Personally, I had to laugh when Grant called the Oscar’s a vanity fair (“the world regarded as a place of frivolity and idle amusement”), and Ashley Graham thought he meant the Vanity Fair after party… The real disappointment in that interview was when Graham said Grant had “starred” in Glass Onion, when really he was in it for five seconds, which he graciously pointed out.
It’s the perfect example of the disconnect between our media-trained stars now, and those of Grant’s era. There’s a sense celebrities need to do the song and dance to show gratitude for being where they are. I wonder if this has diluted real star quality in our actors, because it reins them in from being truly charming. After all, charm isn’t about people-pleasing, it’s about having an allure and causing the person on the receiving end of it to be a little self-conscious about where they stand.
Delightful quotes from Hugh Grant that make me feel like me and him are more or less the same person:
On having children: “I think I’m just a bit of a glamour queen. I like the idea of flitting around the world, and not living in a semi-detached.”
On eventually (perhaps) becoming a writer: “That is still my fantasy. I should do that. Maybe as soon as these films are out… But I don’t know, I’ve probably wasted so much time now. But a couple of hours spent at the word processor makes me feel like a completely different girl…”
the hugh renaissance! finally something to look forward to!!!
Hugh was arrested in 1995…well before Notting Hill! Don’t think it makes a big difference though since he had two movies come out that year too.