Bachelor Hugh plays "dad" in About a Boy.
"I'm not deep," bluntly declares the deceptively humble Hugh Grant. "I've always been drawn to shallow." While the sentiment reflects the image of the endearingly awkward bachelors whom the British actor has portrayed in his most visible films, it betrays the true nature of the man, whose wry British sensibility is actually rather stern, edgy and intense.
Indeed, the fact that Grant has made his career ostensibly reinventing the role he played in 1990's Four Weddings and a Funeral dismays the Oxford-educated actor, though he doesn't speak easily about it. After all, he has made dozens of films, many of which were not romantic comedies (including Small Time Crooks, Mickey Blue Eyes, Extreme Measures, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, Restoration, An Awfully Big Adventure).
"[Being typecast] may be partly my fault," he says somewhat squeamishly of his most successful parts (in Four Weddings, Nine Months, Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill). "Because I've always chosen jobs more on the basis of -- is it well-written and entertaining rather than is it interesting and stretching for me as an actor? And that has meant that I probably have repeated myself too often."