Hugh Grant has been chatting about last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and rewriting his part in the next Bridget Jones.
Hugh Grant hasn’t appeared in too many franchise films over the years. One major studio film Grant did appear, though, was last year’s Paramount fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Grant was a delightful watch as the film’s villain, but looking on from the outside, it seems that film didn’t hit the commercial heights needed to justify a sequel.
in a new interview with Vanity Fair, Grant chatted about that film’s muted performance, and revealed a little about what drives his choices and what can often steer him away from bigger budget films.
“It’s the biggest mystery to me,” the actor said of Dungeons & Dragon’s disappointing box office. “Why didn’t anyone do market research before? I think that’s what went wrong: basically, people just thought, I don’t want to see a film about this game. Why had no one asked the public?”
Talking about the process of signing up for big studio films, Grant said: “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 breathing down the neck of these filmmakers, and I don’t want to make that decision. I 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.”
There is one studio series that Grant will be returning to, though, and that’s the next Bridget Jones film, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy. Again though, despite liking the script, Grant wasn’t overly enamoured with the part for his character: “I loved the script,” he said, “it made me cry, and I wanted to help with this one. 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.”
Grant would rewrite part of his role to his satisfaction before agreeing to appear in the film. Given how much value and colour he brings to these studio roles (especially last year’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre), you’d think more studio executives would be happy to give Grant some studio leeway. Still, at least we’ll get to see him return in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. The film is set for a 2025 release.
