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Hugh Grant

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Hugh Grant Empty Hugh Grant

Post  eddie Tue Mar 20, 2012 5:03 am

Mr floppy-fringe reveals all- well, almost nothing:
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Hugh Grant: 'I love getting into a taxi and saying House of Lords instead of Soho – again'

In his latest role, he's taken on the tabloids – 'a vicious and vindictive industry'. But soon Hugh Grant will be back on familiar ground, giving voice to a big, barrel-chested pirate. In a rare interview, he tells Decca Aitkenhead about standing up for what is right, fatherhood and the genius of Aardman

Decca Aitkenhead

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 March 2012 19.30 GMT

Hugh Grant Hugh-Grant-007
Hugh Grant with a model of the character he voices in his latest film, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists. Photograph: William Selden for the Guardian

The Hugh Grant I meet in a west London restaurant could barely look less relaxed if I'd found him in the dock at the Old Bailey. The mischievously witty actor we know from our screens is nowhere to be seen; in his place is a sober and strained-looking man who actually shudders as we greet.

"Well, I'm very unrelaxed doing a newspaper interview. I think it's only the third British newspaper interview I've done to promote a film in 16 years. But I want to be nice to the Guardian, because I think they've been brilliant." He looks excruciatingly uncomfortable. "Yes, that would be correct," he concurs. How horrible is this for him? "Well, I really hate giving newspaper interviews. I don't want people to be able to say, 'Oh look, he's using this hacking issue to get attention for himself.' It just sticks in my craw if it's about me." Is this as bad as he'd feared? "Yes. It is."

I confess I'm nervous, too, unsure how to interview the star of a campaign against press intrusion without trespassing on the very privacy he's been so persuasively defending. Ever since Grant became the poster boy of the Hacked Off campaign against press criminality and corruption, the tabloids have been poisonous, hounding the mother of his newborn child and accusing him of lying to the Leveson inquiry. In the words of one infamous Daily Mail column, "Grant has become a lonely, bitter man consumed with hatred of the media who helped make him a star... In truth, this great moral crusader is just another hypocritical celebrity who enjoys the money and fame that media exposure gives him, but who refuses to accept the accompanying responsibilities."

Grant is now in an impossible position, wanting to be generous towards the newspaper that exposed the hacking scandal, and willing to help promote his new film, but aware that anything he says will be reworked by the tabloids as proof that he uses the press when it suits him. As he has pointed out repeatedly for the past year, media coverage is a mutual transaction – not a gift from the press, but a commercial product to sell papers. And yet, when I ask him if he's afraid of the Mail, he says, "Yes, of course. Terrified. Yeah."

So he scans every question like a bomb disposal expert, only ever meeting my gaze at the end of an answer, when he throws a dead stare to say that's as far as he'll go. Compliments are received with all the enthusiasm of a minnow accepting chocolates from a shark, and silences left to linger in the air. Needless to say, I become increasingly shrill, rushing to fill them with inane babble, which elicits only introspective "Hmm"s and gloomy "Mmm"s. Embarrassed, I tell him it feels like talking to a deeply unamused QC.

"Well, the whole thing of putting your hand up is very frightening, and it always has been, because they have been a very vicious and vindictive industry to take on – particularly when they're in collusion with the police, and basically the government as well. You can't find a much more frightening enemy than that."

Grant used to retaliate against press malpractice with libel suits and the occasional colourful, if not terribly effective, outburst. "For years I used to rant and rave at dinner parties and in pubs about how a section of the media was running the country. It was always particularly revolting to me to see those people feted, courted and arse-licked by senior politicians and general London glitterati. You'd go to a Vogue party and there would be Rebekah Wade, with everyone being lovely to her, and I'd think, why is this woman invited? Why is she here?" Finding himself next to George Osborne at a dinner party before the last election, he got into such a row about Andy Coulson that their hostess had to calm things down. "Well, it was a little bit nasty," he concedes. "A bit snippy." And he punched Elisabeth Murdoch's husband, Matthew Freud, at a party in a nightclub? "Er, that is true. I don't want to go into the details, but yeah, he put chocolate cake on my shirt and I lamped him."

But then Grant's car broke down early last year and a passing ex-hack turned publican, Paul McMullan, stopped to take photos and offered him a lift, during which he cheerfully admitted to all manner of illegal activity in his former profession. Grant subsequently visited McMullan's pub, secretly taped him repeating the confession, published it in the New Statesman and was recruited by Hacked Off – since when he has become a formidable public advocate for wholesale media reform. "Phone hacking is, in a way, a detail," he explains. Grant wants to challenge the assumptions – expressed with such moral certainty by that Daily Mail column – on which the entire tabloid business model is based.

The argument he presented to the Leveson inquiry was devastating in its simplicity. "It seems to me insane that because I've once sold you a pint of milk for 50p, that you can then say you sold me some milk , you slut, I'm going to take your milk for free for ever." It's hard to think of another industry that operates on this premise – but I wonder whether Grant is angry with the C-listers who secretly sell their own stories and collude with paparazzi, gifting the tabloids a notional excuse that all famous people are therefore fair game.

"Erm, well, it's not my cup of tea, what they do – but I don't condemn them. You always have to remember that little word consent. If you do do that, it's a transaction; privacy is a commodity that you are entitled to sell, without the person you sell it to thinking, well, I can help myself to it for ever afterwards." Would the analogy be a prostitute's client who claims the right to rape her for ever, just because he once paid her? "Yes, I do think that that argument is a largely convenient one for the tabloid industry, rather than a logical one."

Some would argue that privacy is no longer a clearcut commodity. Grant's own close friend and ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley, conducted her courtship with Shane Warne last year on Twitter; when someone invades their own privacy, are they inviting attention? "Well, again, it comes back to – I refer the right honourable gentleman to the answer I gave before, which is to do with consent."

Those who'd previously mistaken Grant for a foppish airhead toff have been surprised to discover this cool forensic mind. It's just possible that Grant, who won a scholarship to Oxford, feels the same way himself. "At Oxford I was far more alive," he once said, "especially in the head. Since then I've atrophied." So I ask if he's rather enjoying his new role.

"I'm not sure enjoy is quite the right word, because it is quite intimidating." An anonymous caller phoned the mother of his then unborn child last year and ordered her to make Grant "shut the fuck up" when he appeared on Question Time. "But certainly, at the ripe old age of 51, it's nice to be speaking my own lines, being my own person, rather than sitting there in make-up saying someone else's lines. You're dealing in real life rather than just synthetic life. Which is very refreshing. I love getting into a taxi and saying House of Lords instead of, you know, Soho – again."

He can't see himself campaigning about anything else, though. "I don't think so. I'm such a chronic relativist, I can't hold down a strong opinion about many things long enough. It's very rare in life to be sure about something – particularly when it's an issue. I'm a terrible vacillator; I can be sure of something one day and change my mind the next. But on this one I've just been so sure all along – and it's quite gratifying to work on something where you feel certitude instead of, oh, maybe I'm wrong."

Critics have caricatured his certainty as the obsession of a conspiracy theorist, but I don't detect any trace of that. In calmly measured tones he allows that it's "conceivable" the Daily Mail's editor – who accused Grant of concocting a "mendacious smear" against his newspaper at the Leveson inquiry – genuinely didn't know what some of his reporters had been up to. It is "conceivable", too, that David Cameron hired Coulson out of "naivety". He's even willing to accept McMullan's claim that the tipoff about Grant's new baby came not through nefarious means but an anonymous letter from someone close to the actor. "Obviously there's a part of me that thinks the letter might be a fake – because Paul can be a bit, er, eccentric – but I don't know. I've seen it now, and I suspect it's probably true. But I don't know who in my orbit would have done it, especially as it wasn't done for money."

That must make him awfully paranoid. "Well, I am a bit paranoid." Grant's whole frame tenses. "But – I can't emphasise this enough – this isn't about me. Your questions are about the trials and tribulations of me as an actor, but my ranting and raving is much more about corruption of the police, intimidation of government; all that kind of stuff. The trials and tribulations of so-called celebrities is the bottom of my list of concerns."

Grant looks a lot less anxious when the conversation turns to the new Aardman film, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists!, a rollicking 3D animation by the Wallace & Gromit creators about a band of hapless pirates who get tangled up with Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria. It is a slapstick family comedy, spiked with jokes about evolution for the grown-ups, voiced by a stellar cast featuring David Tennant, Salma Hayek and Imelda Staunton. Grant signed up for the lead part of Pirate Captain the minute he read the script.

Hugh Grant Four-weddings-007
Leading man material – Grant in 1994's Four Weddings And A Funeral. Photograph: Allstar

"I mean, Aardman, I think they're proper geniuses. I've never seen an Aardman film I didn't admire, and the script above all was just incredibly funny and fresh. I actually have to act in this, because I saw the puppet and I'm not that person – a big barrel-chested, bearded pirate. But they're so brilliant – they've got 16 jokes going on at once, in terms of physical humour, and you think, thank God, that takes the pressure off me; I only have to be reasonably good at this, cos they'll make the rest of it funny in visual terms. In fact, you'd hardly know it's me. My young cousins who've seen the trailer still don't believe it's me." Does he take that as a compliment? "I do, rather. Yes."

Grant often likes to say he wasn't the director's choice for a role and Pirates! is no exception. "With cartoons they make a rough drawing and then they get their favourite local actors to do the voices. They then take it to the studio and say we want to make it, and the studio says fine, but you can't use the actors you've been using, you have to use 'names'. And so then poor old Peter Lord, the director, has to come to me and say, 'Will you do the voice?' And I said to him, 'I know you don't want me, you'd much rather use the guy you've been using for the first two years.' And he pretended for a bit, 'No, no, that's not true!' But in the end I got it out of him, 'Well, yes, yes, you are really revoicing someone we love.' "

By now he's starting to sound much more like his endlessly deprecating old self – a media persona he has perfected with peerless charm and deployed whenever talking about his films. It is witty and urbane, and highly appealing – but also effective at obscuring any hint of what he actually thinks. Instead of being self-deprecating, I suggest, how about naming some things he's brilliant at. Grant looks appalled. "No. I… er... I don't know." But when pressed he has a think. "We-ell, the only reason I've had a career is because I was good at recognising and prioritising what was entertaining. A lot of actors look at scripts and think, how will this stretch me as an actor? But I always thought, do I want to turn the page, is this going to make people laugh?" He knows some critics say he's only ever good at playing versions of himself, but thinks this isn't quite fair.

"Broadly speaking there are two kinds of acting, character acting and lead acting. And in my life, to begin with, in the 1980s, it was all character acting. And then when, by fluke, through Four Weddings, I got into doing lead parts, it's a completely different thing. If you do too much acting in a lead part in a feature film where you're 40ft high, it's rather unattractive. You can see the acting. And it's actually the right thing to do to bring as much of yourself, I believe, to the part as you possibly can – to minimise the amount of theatrical stuff that you need to do. So that's my probably feeble defence of why a lot my parts seemed me-ish. I've done it deliberately.

"And I was also quite an effective prima donna in terms of making sure that a good script survived production, so I was very interfering – to the point of insanity. I used to be quite good at that."

I take his use of the past tense for a device to make naming his talents less disagreeable, but he says, "No, I mean the past tense." But Grant has been threatening to give up acting and take up writing for as long as I can remember – and then he always makes another film. "Well, that is of course true." Has he ever genuinely thought he would quit? "Erm… I think I probably meant it – especially in the last three years. I mean, I've hardly done anything, and had no great desire to do anything – apart from these oddities like Pirates!" He thinks a third Bridget Jones will probably happen, but is waiting to see if the script comes up to scratch.

The most memorable line of the first Bridget Jones movie was Grant's startled delight on discovering Jones' gigantic control pants – "Hello Mummy!" – which wasn't even in the script. He ad-libs a few times in Pirates!, too – and those are the moments he most enjoys. "Definitely," he says with feeling. "Definitely. I'm much happier ad-libbing. Much better. Much freer." He can see the next question coming – so where is the Hugh Grant screenplay? – and murmurs a rueful, "Yuh, I know.

"The thing is, I'm not bad at coming up with the lines. But I'm not very good at coming up with story. So there's huge files at home of ideas, and things I've worked up and thought looked quite promising. And then, you know, some acting job comes up and it's something of a snooze button; I think, oh, maybe I'll just do that and come back to this. So that's been the story of my life for the last 20 years." It's the same story with the book he's been trying to write. "Like lots of people who say I'm going to write a novel, it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't." I ask how the novel's going and he manages a rare wry smile. "I haven't touched it for two or three years."

Grant's ambivalence towards his own success has, I suspect, played a major part in his problems with the press. His refusal to follow the approved script for movie stars – "I-can't-believe-my-luck! I'm-living-the-dream!" – is taken for ingratitude by the tabloids, so they cast him as dissolute and arrogant. Having become a father last September – following a "fleeting affair" with Tinglan Hong, a Chinese 32-year-old – he is now cast as a cad who couldn't even be bothered to turn up to his own daughter's birth. The irony is not lost on Grant, who blames the press for forcing him to miss it, for fear of attracting the inevitable media circus.

"I was at one of the party conferences, about to give a speech," he recalls, "and was pacing about on the end of the phone. I shouldn't have gone to the hospital at all, because it brought all this attention down on the mother's head. But I couldn't really resist it, so I went on the second day." Did he cry? "I did feel a little lumpy when I first met my daughter, yeah." It's only thanks to a court injunction that he can now visit her without having to navigate the pandemonium of a press pack, which he says had made Hong's life unbearable. "Had we not got the injunction, I'm sure she'd be in China by now. She is a good person, a nice person; funny, clever, great mother. And she's been very badly treated by the media."

Grant never used to sound wildly keen on babies – "I don't mind them for about four minutes," he once said, "that's my max. After that I can't see what everyone's fussing about." So I ask if he'd been worried that he might not fall for his own. "Um, lots of people warned me about that; they said never let anyone know, but the baby period is not that exciting. But I am excited, actually. I thought, well, I'll bluff through – but very little bluffing has been required. I like my daughter very much. Fantastic. Has she changed my life? I'm not sure. Not yet. Not massively, no. But I'm absolutely thrilled to have had her, I really am. And I feel a better person."

Does he mean what Warren Beatty once said of fatherhood – that it was a relief to be no longer all "me, me, me"? "Well, I think I do feel a little less me, me, me. But then, I've had other family I look after; I have an elderly father who's not very well at the moment, so it's never been entirely me, me, me."

He chose his daughter's English name, Tabitha; her mother chose a Chinese name, and Grant has been given a Chinese language book for beginners. "But I haven't given it the attention it needs yet. I do know some disgusting Chinese words. They're not entirely appropriate for baby rearing." The biggest surprise for him so far has been paternal pride. "There probably is some truth that one of our main functions on the planet is to reproduce, because it feels like more of an achievement than it should do. Which is nonsense, really. But yesterday I took my daughter to see my father, who's in hospital, and all the nurses were cooing over her. And I felt, well, pride."

He hasn't read any parenting books and doesn't intend to – "There's a lot of over-parenting, to my eye, anyway" – but plans to be "incredibly strict" on a few key issues. "Well, it would all be total hypocrisy, of course, but things like good manners and not being selfish. It's just unattractive in a child, I don't like it. And discipline – I do think discipline's important. I'm very glad that I had quite a strict mother who was big on discipline, because you really cannot get anything done in life if there's too much" – and he adopts a silly mumsy voice – "'Oh, well, if you don't feel like it, don't do it, just express yourself.' I'm not really very big on that. Especially as in the entertainment industry in particular, it really is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration – and discipline. You cannot get anything done without it."

He's a Tiger Mom! "No, I have the Tiger Mom. I'll be Lamb Daddy. But also my other worry is about – and as I say, there are few things in life I believe in 100% – but another one is not giving your children money. I see nothing but fuck-ups among my trust-fund friends. It's like 99% fuck-ups. So I would not want to do that to my children, no."

Grant breaks off abruptly, looking miserable. "Look, I couldn't be more uncomfortable talking to you about this stuff. Nothing seems to me more unattractive than baring your soul in a national newspaper. I don't particularly enjoy listening to any actor anatomising their personality, so I don't want to be that person."

He is not that person, clearly. But it's pretty clear that he's not the bounder the tabloids claim either, nor the talent-lite dilettante his self-deprecation might imply. I'm fairly certain Grant actually considers himself hard-working, responsible, clever and kind. But his acute anxiety about the press gets easily confused for arrogance, just because he's rich and famous. Before we part, I ask if he's ever had moments of regret about taking on the tabloids.

"Yes, of course. The backlash moments have been terrible. Traditionally, they will always take their revenge. It might be eaten cold, but there will be revenge."
eddie
eddie
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