Hugh Grant has never been the terrible actor he insists he is

No one is more disdainful of Hugh Grant’s three decades of superstardom than Hugh Grant himself. But as the self-deprecating actor steals the show as an Oompa-Loompa in ‘Wonka’ – despite insisting to the press that he hated every miserable second of making the film – Geoffrey Macnab explores his strange, scandal-surviving and actually quite brilliant career so far

His loveable, floppy-haired prime: Hugh Grant in his 1999 romcom classic ‘Notting Hill’ (Shutterstock)

Maybe Hugh Grant was always destined to play an Oompa-Loompa. It isn’t a fate he appears to be relishing, though. This week the actor is seen as the diminutive Lofty opposite Timothée Chalamet’s Willy Wonka in Wonka, a prequel to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Early reviews have been very generous (“comes close to pinching the whole thing,” “uproarious” and “delightfully silly”), but there’s no getting around the fact that this is not an elegant look for Grant: the usually svelte star of Richard Curtis classics Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003) here resembles nothing so much as a grizzled garden gnome. He has orange skin, green hair, and his oversized head is attached to a tubby, tiny little body.

“I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more,” Grant recently said. This was a role heavily dependent on animation and special effects, and he found it all excruciating. He’s also told the press that he “slightly hated” the process of making films in general, but that he had “a lot of children and needed the money”.

This was (partly) the kind of deadpan irony in which Grant has always excelled. Few other actors could get away with remarks like these on the eve of a major movie release, but Grant has a very British knack for understatement and self-deprecation. If he really disliked the experience of making Wonka, he presumably wouldn’t be travelling the world to promote it. He must have been gratified, at least, to hear himself described by Chalamet as “one of our greats”, although it may have dented his vanity to have been cast as young Wonka’s stooge. Only a few years ago, he would surely have been the main man.