The foolproof way Hugh Grant manages to upstage his co-stars in every movie

Posted On March 18, 2025March 18, 2025

If you’ve seen Hugh Grant in anything lately, you might have thought, ‘Wow, he is the best thing about this entire film.’ This was never a foregone conclusion. After exiting the world of rom-coms in the late 2000s, he took an on-and-off hiatus from acting, only making five live-action movies (most of them terrible) between 2007 and 2015. In the nine years that followed, however, he made 11 and starred in two high-profile miniseries.

Grant’s re-entry into the world of acting has been something of a shock, in the best way. He was always perfect in rom-coms, which meant that he was devastatingly charming, British, and youthful, but not particularly Oscar-worthy. He lit up a screen because of his enviable genetics, not because of his dramatic skills. Sure, he had great comic timing, but he wasn’t exactly Daniel Day-Lewis.

Now, however, Grant is a full-blown character actor playing leading roles. Think of the range of his disgraced, desperate politician in A Very English Scandal, his incorrigible thespian Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2, and his unforgettable rendition of an Oompa Loompa in Wonka. The man is on fire, and we’re all just lucky to be witnessing it in real-time.

Even when the movie he’s in isn’t very good, he still manages to come out of it unscathed and iconic. Think of Jerry Seinfeld’s cringeworthy dumpster fire Unfrosted from 2024, in which Grant played an actor who plays a cereal mascot in TV adverts but believes he’s the next Laurence Olivier. The film is hardly watchable, but every time the Notting Hill star is on screen, you regain the will to live, and even laugh.

This is no accident. It turns out that recently, Grant’s ability to deliver the greatest performances in all his movies comes down to the scripts rather than just the acting. According to the director of Paddington in Peru, the weakest of the series so far that nevertheless features a show-stopping cameo from Grant, the actor wrote the majority of his scene.

“Hugh came up with the idea that Phoenix was imminently about to be released [from prison],” Dougal Wilson told Entertainment Weekly, adding, “He was very, very up for it and wrote the idea of the bears becoming involved in this new production.”

When he was asked to return to the Bridget Jones series in 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, Grant was reluctant. He read the script and felt that his character, Daniel Cleaver, didn’t have any reason to be there, so he turned it down. Last year, however, the filmmakers asked him to do the next installment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and instead of bowing out again, he decided he had to make it work.

“I loved the script—it made me cry, and I wanted to help with this one,” he told Vanity Fair. “But really there’s no part for Daniel Cleaver in it at all. They wanted him in it, and in the end, they’d done something I wasn’t crazy about.”

So he went away and wrote a few scenes for the character, not to make himself the star of the movie, but to replace what the screenwriters had written for him. It worked. In fact, it worked so well that even the negative reviews of the film singled out his performance as one of the only bright spots.

It isn’t clear whether Grant wrote his scenes in other movies, but it’s safe to say that on the occasions that he has, the results have been stand-out successes. Any directors who work with him in the future would be doing themselves a favour to send him the script long before they cast anyone and let him work his magic. Better yet, just have him write the dang movie.

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