Hugh Grant has always been delightfully grumpy, but lately he’s upped the ante. At the Oscars earlier this year he gave a hilariously disinterested interview. He’s on a press tour for Wonka, which reunites him with his Paddington 2 director James King. Grant has not held back, confessing he had a miserable time playing a mostly CGI Oompa Loompa. Another thing he didn’t like? Having to dance.
During a group interview for Entertainment Weekly, Grant’s costars — including Timothée Chalamet, Keegan-Michael Key, and Calah Lane — asked if the dances he did in the film were real, considering most of his performance is CGI.
“I did do it, yes,” Grant admitted.
King chimed in to elaborate. “No animator could dance that angrily,” he said. “It’s the angriest dancing in film history.”
Grant is no fan of dancing onscreen. Last year he admitted he found the frügging he had to do in Love Actually, in which his Prime Minister wilds out to The Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (For My Love),” to be “excruciating.”
“I saw it in the script and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll hate doing that,’” Grant recalled. “I didn’t fancy doing the dance at all, let alone rehearsing it.”
Perhaps King was trying to torture him by making him dance again. In Wonka, Grant’s 18-inch Oompa Loompa not only does some dancing, but he even wields a flute. During the EW sit-down, Grant spoke about the animation team that took footage of him standing around with a helmet into the creature seen onscreen.
“The bit that’s my face is frankly mediocre,” he said, self-deprecatingly.
In a press conference for the film from last week, Grant was more open about disliking his Wonka experience. Per Deadline:
“I made a big fuss about it,” Grant said. “I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.” Asked if the ends justified the means, he replied: “Not really.”
Grant later joked that it was nothing personal against Wonka and director Paul King. “I slightly hate [making films] but I have lots of children and need money,” he said.
Wonka hits theaters on December 15.
(Via EW)