‘The First Time’ With Hugh Grant

Hugh Grant discusses The Undoing, auditioning for Four Weddings and a Funeral, and more on Rolling Stone‘s The First Time.

Grant kicked things off by explaining how he got involved with The Undoing, the six-part HBO series he stars in alongside Nicole Kidman. He was initially surprised that director Susanne Bier was interested in working with him. “Although I think she’s a brilliant film director, I thought she hated me,” he admits. “We’d had this experience 10 years previously where we developed a script together, and I kept saying, ‘I don’t think it quite works. And if we can’t get it to work, I’m going to walk away.’ She clearly never believed me. Sets were built and people were hired. And then I did walk away. So I was astonished that she’d want me again.”

Grant adds that he’s still wondering about his decision to have a career in acting. “The fact is, I never did make that decision in my life,” he cracks. “I just fell into it accidentally at one point when I was about 24, and I’ve been meaning to leave ever since and never quite got around to it.”

He also talks about auditioning for Four Weddings and a Funeral at the Jim Henson studio in London. “Kermit the Frog and all those other characters were all around me as I did my audition,” he recalls. “Which was unsettling.”

Elsewhere in the video, the actor talks about starring in 1995’s Sense and Sensibility and 2017’s Paddington 2. “It’s a difficult experience, because he’s not there,” he says of the CGI bear. While shooting the scenes, actors were the given choice of talking to either a woman or a stick with Paddington’s head on it. “Which was terrifying,” he adds. “I couldn’t look at it. Or you could just have a stick. And in the end, I found I got on quite well with a stick.”