Hugh Grant talks about roles he has turned down, parts that revived his career

Los Angeles, Sep 12 (IANS) Hollywood star Hugh Grant has credited producers the Wachowskis for reviving his career.

He talked about essaying six roles in the sibling filmmakers’ 2012 feature adaptation of “Cloud Atlas” after “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” with Sarah Jessica Parker failed to perform at the theatres.

“I was completely marooned. The Wachowskis offered me just a few small little parts in ‘Cloud Atlas’,” Grant told Vanity Fair.

“And to be honest, I was probably only offered that because some of their international distributors had said, ‘We need some more recognisable names. Cram someone recognisable in here.’ They would’ve thought, ‘Oh, we don’t really want Hugh Grant, but we’ll give him some tiny parts.’ They will deny that but I think it’s partly what happened.”

“Cloud Atlas” is based on the 2004 novel by David Mitchell, which traces the story of six epic interwoven tales spanning from 1849 to 2321. Each story offered Grant a juicy antagonistic character — albeit the film received backlash for featuring Grant and several other white actors portraying East Asian characters during one timeline, reports deadline.com.

“I thought, Oh yeah, I used to really enjoy doing characters—in fact, I almost used to enjoy acting,” he said.

The actor said that he started out doing silly voices, odd people, making people laugh at university, and then doing this comedy show in London.

“It was doing characters. Then through sheer chance, maybe because of the way I looked, I got drawn into the leading romantic hero. It went fine, but it’s not what I think I’m best at—partly because it’s less fun.”

Grant said his career has since “completely changed” as he’s made a transition from playing romantic lead to essaying shades of gray more often these days.

“On a big screen, over 90 minutes, unless there’s a sense of the quivering jelly—the damaged bit inside—it’s going to be boring and just be a mustache-twirling baddie. You’ve got to get to the jelly,” he said.

The actor also talked about some of the roles he turned down.

“I’ve turned down a few that I thought were insufficient in quality or independence allowed to the filmmakers—you felt like a big corporation (was) breathing down the neck of these filmmakers, and I don’t want to make that decision.”

Explaining how he can tell the difference, Grant said that he generally asked them bluntly.

“I quizzed the directors. You can tell quite early on, since you might have a few ideas about the part before you’ve signed up—you suggest things, and you can tell if there’s a lot of pushback from non creative executives.”

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