Hugh Grant calls his Notting Hill character 'despicable,' says he doesn't 'have any balls'

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

"Whenever I’m flicking the channels at home after a few drinks and this comes up, I just think, Why doesn’t my character have any balls?" he recently told Vanity Fair. "There's a scene in this film where she's in my house and the paps come to the front door and ring the bell and I think I just let her go past me and open the door. That's awful."

The scene in question from the Richard Curtis-penned rom-com classic finds the actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) besieged by paparazzi at the flat of Grant's character William Thacker, with whom she's been sharing an on-again off-again romance that's recently gone through a major off period. Ever since they parted six months earlier Thacker has been pining for Scott, dwelling on what he could have done differently to keep her in his life. Then she shows back up, and he just lets her go again.

"I've never had a girlfriend, or indeed now wife, who hasn't said, '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 — it's how it was written. And I think he’s despicable, really."

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Grant made his name on rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Nine Months. By the time Notting Hill came along in 1999, his star persona was fully associated with the genre, or at least broadly with romance, including his roles in period romances like Sense and Sensibility and Maurice.

But after Notting Hill led to a spree of successful rom-coms in the early 2000s — Bridget Jones films, Two Weeks Notice, and the perennial Christmas season must-watch Love Actually — Grant more or less left the genre behind. The last out-and-out romantic comedy film he starred in was 2014's The Rewrite, whose reception paled in comparison to the Notting Hill and Bridget Jones films of days past.

A lack of good material or faltering success in rom-com roles isn't what broke his streak, however. Grant broke it himself. In the past few years he's gone on record numerous times to express his distaste, even disgust at the genre, with Notting Hill being a particular target.

He was "sure" that all his past rom-com relationships would by now be "all disasters. Those films were all lies," he told Collider in 2020. "I’m sure that my character in Notting Hill and Julia Roberts’ character have been through the ugliest imaginable divorce with really expensive, nasty lawyers."

He told Wired the ending of the film "nauseating," said during a press junket for a recent film that "the whole idea of a man and a woman belonging together" is a "big fat lie," and when asked while promoting thriller series The Undoing if he'll ever do another rom-com, the BAFTA winner replied, "I would like to do a sequel to one of my own romantic comedies that shows what happened after those films ended...to prove the terrible lie that they all were: that it was a happy ending."

"I'd like to do me and Julia and the hideous divorce that's ensued with really expensive lawyers, children involved in [a] tug of love, floods of tears. Psychologically scarred forever," he continued in his mischievous style.

Roberts has expressed her own mixed feelings about Notting Hill, telling Curtis earlier this year that "one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was your movie, playing a movie actress." She remembered being "so uncomfortable" that she "almost didn’t take the part because it just seemed — oh, it just seemed so awkward. I didn’t even know how to play that person."

On that point, Grant gallantly disagrees. Despite his venom for his own Notting Hill character, he told Vanity Fair that "all the time with Julia, as with any brilliant actress, you just think, Oh Christ they're really good, I'm not going to be as good as her. She is great at emoting, and she's got that kind of quality where it looks like her skin is wafer thin, you can sort of see her soul."