Grant has all but negated his own character in the romantic comedy classic since its 1999 release.

You’d think that starring in one of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time would help you in the dating department. But Hugh Grant says that Notting Hill only caused him problems.

“Every time I watch the channels at home after a few drinks and it comes back on, I just think: Why doesn’t my character have any balls?” he recently declared Vanity Fair. “There’s a scene in this movie where she’s at my house and the dads come to the front door and ring the bell and I think I let her walk past me and open the door. It’s horrible.”

The scene in question from Richard Curtis-a written romantic comedy classic finds actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) besieged by paparazzi in the apartment of Grant’s character, William Thacker, with whom she shares an on-again, off-again romance that has recently gone through a major dormant period. Since they broke up six months earlier, Thacker has pined for Scott, thinking about what he could have done differently to keep her in his life. Then she reappears and he lets her go.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend, or even now a wife, who hasn’t said to me, ‘Why the hell didn’t you stop her? What’s wrong with you?’ ” Grant said. “And I don’t really have an answer to that – that’s how it’s written. And I think it’s really despicable.”

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Grant made a name for himself in romantic comedies like Four weddings and a funeral And Nine months. By time Notting Hill arrived in 1999, her star persona was fully associated with the genre, or at least largely with romance, including her roles in period romances like Senses and sensitivity And Mauritius.

But after Notting Hill led to a string of hit romantic comedies in the early 2000s – Brigitte Jones movies, Two weeks noticeand the eternal Christmas period not to be missed Love in fact — Grant has more or less left the genre behind him. The last romantic comedy film he starred in was in 2014. The rewritewhose reception pales in comparison to the Notting Hill And Brigitte Jones films of yesteryear.

However, a lack of good material or halting success in romantic comedy roles isn’t what broke his streak. Grant broke it himself. Over the past few years, he has repeatedly recorded his distaste, even loathing, for the genre, with Notting Hill being a particular target.

He was “sure” that all his past relationships in romantic comedies would now be “a disaster. Those movies were just lies,” he said. Collider in 2020. “I’m sure my character in Notting Hill and Julia Roberts’ character went through the ugliest divorce imaginable with some really expensive and nasty lawyers. »

He told Wired the end of the film “nauseating”, said during a press conference for a recent film, that “the very idea of ​​a man and a woman belonging together” is a “big lie”, and when request while promoting a thriller series The defeat If he ever makes another romantic comedy, the BAFTA winner replied: “I would love to do a sequel to one of my own romantic comedies that shows what happened after those films ended. .to prove the terrible lie they all told was: that it was a happy ending.”

“I would like to do me and Julia and the ugly divorce that follows with very expensive lawyers, children involved in (a) love affair, floods of tears. Psychologically scarred forever,” he said continued in his mischievous style.

Related: Richard Curtis regrets fat-shaming and lack of diversity Love in fact, Notting Hill

Roberts expressed his mixed feelings about Notting Hilltelling Curtis earlier this year that “one of the hardest things I ever had to do was act in a movie, a movie actress.” She remembers being “so uncomfortable” that she “almost didn’t play the role because it just seemed – oh, it seemed so awkward. I didn’t even know how to play this person.”

On this point Grant valiantly disagrees. Despite his venom for his Notting Hill character, he said Vanity Fair that “all the time with Julia, as with any brilliant actress, one simply thinks, Oh my God, they’re really good, I’m not going to be as good as her. She’s good at emotions, and she has this kind of quality where it’s like her skin is really thin, you can kind of see her soul.”