You’d think that starring in one of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time would help you in the dating department. But Hugh Grant says that Notting Hill has only caused him trouble.

“Every time I’m flipping through the channels at home after a few drinks and this pops up, I think: Why does my character have no balls?he said recently Vanity fair. “There’s a scene in this movie where she’s in my house and the daddies come to the front door and ring the bell and I think I just let her pass me by and open the door. That’s horrible.”

In the scene in question from the Richard Curtis-penned rom-com classic, actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) is besieged by paparazzi at the apartment of Grant’s character William Thacker, with whom she shares an on-again-off-again romance that recently has appeared after a major off-period. Since they broke up six months earlier, Thacker has longed for Scott and thinks about what he could have done differently to keep her in his life. Then she shows up again and he just lets her go again.

“I’ve never had a girlfriend, or even a woman now, who hasn’t said, ‘Why the hell didn’t you stop her? What’s wrong with you?'” Grant said. ‘And I don’t really have an answer to that. That’s how it’s written. And I actually find him despicable.”

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Grant made a name for himself in rom-coms such as Four weddings and a funeral And Nine months. By time Notting Hill came By 1999, his star character became entirely associated with the genre, or at least broadly with romance, including his roles in historical novels like Feeling and sensitivity And Maurice.

But after that Notting Hill led to a wave of successful rom-coms in the early 2000s – Bridget Jones movies, Two weeks noticeand the eternal Christmas season that you must watch Love actually — Grant more or less left the genre behind. The last real romantic comedy he starred in was in 2014 The rewritewhose reception paled in comparison Notting Hill And Bridget Jones films from the past.

However, a lack of good material or faltering success in rom-com roles isn’t what broke his streak. Grant broke it himself. In recent years, he has gone on record countless times to express his distaste, even disgust, for the genre Notting Hill be a specific target.

He was “sure” that by now “all his previous rom-com relationships would be disastrous.” Those films were all lies,” he said. Collider in 2020. “I’m sure my character is in it Notting Hill and Julia Roberts’ character has been through the ugliest divorce imaginable with very expensive, nasty lawyers.”

He told Wired that the film’s ending was “sickening,” and said at a press conference for a recent film that “the whole idea of ​​a man and a woman being together” is a “big fat lie,” and when he was told asked while promoting thriller series Undoing it If he ever wants to do another rom-com, the BAFTA winner replied: “I’d like to do a sequel to one of my own romantic comedies, which shows what happened after those films ended… to tell the terrible lie prove that they all were: that it was a happy ending.”

‘I would like to deal with Julia and me, and the horrible divorce that follows, with very expensive lawyers, children involved in (a) heartbreak, a flood of tears. Psychologically scarred forever,” he continued in his mischievous style.

Roberts has expressed her own mixed feelings about it Notting Hillwho told Curtis earlier this year that “one of the hardest things I ever had to do was your movie, playing a movie actress.” She recalled being “so uncomfortable” that she “almost didn’t take the role because it just seemed – oh, it just seemed so uncomfortable.” I didn’t even know how to play that person.”

Grant strongly disagrees on that point. Despite his poison for his own Notting Hill character, he said Vanity fair that “with Julia, like with any brilliant actress, you think all the time: Oh Jesus, they’re really good, I’m not going to be as good as them. She’s great with emotions, and she has those kinds of qualities where it’s like her skin is paper thin, you can see her soul.