LIFE
Hugh Grant Says Former Costar Renée Zellweger Is ‘One of the Few’ He Hasn’t ‘Fallen Out With’
Hugh Grant Says He’d Do a Notting Hill Sequel to Show Rom-Coms Are a ‘Terrible Lie’
Hugh Grant has starred in numerous romantic comedies over the years, including Notting Hill, Love Actually, and Bridget Jones’s Diary
Hugh Grant and his former onscreen love, Renée Zellweger, are still the best of friends.
While making an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show, the 60-year-old British actor opened up about his friendship with his Bridget Jones’s Diary costar.
“I love Renée. Uh, she’s one of the few actresses I haven’t fallen out with,” Grant admitted. “And, we, we got on very well together and, we still exchange long emails.”
“Hers in particular, at least 70 pages each, interesting stuff, but quite hard to decipher and, she’s a properly good egg and a genius,” he added. “Did you see her Judy Garland? About as good as acting gets.”
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Grant and Zellweger, 51, starred together in the 2001 romantic comedy about a 32-year-old English single woman, who writes in her diary about all the things she wishes would happen in her life. However, her life dramatically changes when she suddenly has two men (Grant and Colin Firth) vying for her affection.
They also starred alongside each other in the sequels: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016).
Back in 2018, Grant raved about the Nurse Betty actress while speaking to Jess Cagle, then-PEOPLE editor in chief for The Jess Cagle Interview.
“Renée loves me and I love Renée. Well, I mean she’s in the same category as Emma Thompson, in terms of lunacy, but an amazing actress of course, and very generous,” he said at the time.
“She once sent me a fabulous huge volume of beautiful photography, including a lot of semi-undressed women. I remember it because I had just landed in Marrakesh … and the book was impounded,” Grant added.
During that interview he also spoke about Emma Thompson, his Sense and Sensibility and Love Actually costar, calling her “a genius” but adding that she is “not remotely sane. She’s nuttier and nuttier as the years go.”
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Recently, Grant added a new actress to his list of costars while starring in HBO’s latest drama, The Undoing. In the series, he played opposite Australian-American actress Nicole Kidman.
In his SiriusXM interview, the Notting Hill star touched on how the pair of actors have worked around their respective accents in different works.
“Nicole has always, she’s done loads of films with an American accent… people think of her as half and half,” he explained. “As for me, it’s not that I can’t do an American accent it’s, for me, I like to know precisely, very precisely, who characters are and where they’ve come from, what school did they go to? Which part of that, which town did they live in? What did the dad do for a living? What are their social aspirations or not aspirations? And I know all that with British characters, and I really don’t know anything about those kinds of, that kind of detail in America.”
“So I always worry that I just come out as kind of generic. And then, then I think, well, get an American actor. There’s millions of brilliant ones,” he said.
Drew Barrymore is stepping down as host of this year’s MTV Movie & Music Awards, due to be held on Sunday, in solidarity with the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA). The actress has agreed to host the ceremony next year instead, Variety reported.
Although the MTV awards are set to go ahead without a host, Variety said that arrangements for the show are in constant flux as producers are unsure which of the presenters, nominees, and guests will be willing to appear.
Organizers have already scrapped the red carpet as well as interviews that were supposed to take place before the ceremony.
In a statement quoted by Variety, Barrymore said she had “listened to the writers, and in order to truly respect them, I will pivot from hosting the MTV Movie & TV Awards live in solidarity with the strike.”
The actress added that “everything we celebrate and honor about movies and television is born out of their [writers’] creation,” and revealed that she is “choosing to wait” until a solution is reached on fairly compensating writers for their craft.
Although Barrymore will not be present at the live event in Santa Monica, California on Sunday, she is likely to appear in several pre-recorded short films created for the telecast.
Unions representing writers working in Hollywood and beyond officially began a strike on Tuesday. The move comes amid a dispute with major studios such as Paramount and Universal over working conditions and the shift brought about by the rise of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.
Hollywood writers go on strike
The WGA has complained that its members are being “devalued” and have received reduced pay despite significantly more movies and TV shows being in production than ever before thanks to streaming.
Aside from increased pay, the WGA has issued a list of demands to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents Hollywood’s major studios. Among them is a request for guarantees that scripts would not be generated using Artificial Intelligence, and that writers would not be asked to edit or rewrite screenplays generated by such technology.
The current strike is the first work stoppage in the US entertainment industry in 15 years. The previous writers’ strike in 2007 lasted for 100 days and ultimately cost Hollywood an estimated $2.1 billion.
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