Plenty of people loved Hugh Grant’s character in the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill,” but Grant is not one of them.
He talked about playing William Thacker, opposite Julia Roberts as Anna Scott, during a conversation for Vanity Fair’s “Scene Selection.”
“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?’” Grant said. “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.”
In the film, Anna is a famous actress who falls in love with William, a Notting Hill bookseller. That meant having to navigate her fame, including the ever present paparazzi, something Grant said his character did not do well.
“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 of the scene. “And I don’t really have an answer to that. It’s how it was written. And I think he’s despicable, really.”
Grant found fame playing romantic leading men but has been self-critical of some of his past performances.
“I’ve read that I hate all my films. That’s not true, the films are often great. It’s just me that I loathe. I always think, ‘Oh you f***ed that up,’” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “You never feel great about your own stuff. It’s like in the old days of answering machine messages you always felt nauseated when you heard your own voice. And watching yourself on film is that times 50.”