There was a time, and it doesn't seem like that long ago, when Hugh Grant was the king of the rom-com. From Four Weddings and a Funeral to Two Weeks Notice to Love, Actually. You could barely get away from Grant's smiling face. Many loved him. For others, he became the actor you love to hate simply because he was in so many of the sort of movie that film snobs love to hate. It seems like it's been a while since we've seen the affable actor being charming and romantic, and Grant says he doesn't expect to make any more movies in that genre, mostly because he's too old now.
Hugh Grant is 60-years-old, that much is true, but there's another reason that Grant thinks his days are done in the rom-com. he tells Deadline that it isn't just that he's gotten older, but that one of the side effects of getting older is that he's too ugly to play the romantic lead. According to Grant...
I am too old and ugly to do more romantic comedies.
I'm not sure I would say Hugh Grant is ugly. He still looks pretty damn good for 60-years-old. But the broader point, that the romantic comedy is dominated by young beautiful people, and he is certainly no longer young, is a point well taken. Every once in a while you see a romantic comedy that features older actors and actresses, but they are certainly the exception rather than the rule.
It doesn't seem like Hugh Grant minds that those days are behind him though. He tells Deadline that while the romantic lead roles are gone, when they left they were replaced by roles that were him, very interesting and worth exploring. Grant says...
When I stopped being young and handsome and I wasn't being offered romantic leading men, some really interesting parts came up.
He counts his current role in HBO's limited series The Undoing among those very interesting roles. Grant's early attempts to break out of the romantic lead, something like 1996's Extreme Measures, met with limited success at best. It seems that back then the audience wanted to see Grant as the romantic hero, or at least Hollywood believed that's what the audience wanted. Now, with those days gone, he can spread out and do more, everything from The Undoing with Nicole Kidman to playing the villain in Paddington 2 or somebody more sleezy as in Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen.
If we never see Hugh Grant in a romantic comedy again, we have all his previous films we can still enjoy. But maybe somebody can come up with a way to do a rom-com for an older audience that could let him flex his muscles one more time. I doubt he's missed a step.
