Hugh Grant Is Sad That No One Hooks Up on Movie Sets Anymore

On Monday, Hugh Grant stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote his new movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. At one point, Colbert asked the actor if he’d ever played the popular fantasy role-playing game that the film is based on himself.

Of course, anyone with a rudimentary awareness of Hugh Grant should already know the answer to that. Does he look like a guy who grew up playing D&D in friends’ basements, or does he look like a guy who delighted in shoving nerds into lockers at whatever fancy boarding school he attended? (To be clear, we’re not saying he did — just that, as he told Colbert during his interview, there’s a reason he’s so often typecast as a villain.)

Grant is also famously curmudgeonly, as evidenced by his recent viral interview on the Oscars red carpet, and he answered Colbert’s query by lamenting the fact that film sets are no longer sufficiently debaucherous.

“I think Chris Pine occasionally tried. There was talk of it, but I don’t know,” Grant said. “Films are so weird now. They are weird because, in the old days, by the end of the second week, you were all getting drunk in the evening and having dinner and falling in love with each other and all of that.”

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“All of that stopped because of telephones,” he added. “Everyone goes home and looks at Twitter. It’s so sad.”

“So if there weren’t telephones on set, there will be more affairs going on?” Colbert responded.

“Yeah, I think so,” Grant said. “You know, Tarantino banned telephones from his set, and quite right, too. And the people there, they do all shag each other, so I’m told.”

Of course, he’s joking around. But perhaps it’s not phones that are causing people to keep each other at arm’s length on movie sets these days. Could it be that in a post-Me Too world, people in Hollywood are (rightly) more hesitant to get drunk and have affairs with their coworkers? It’s also worth noting that we’re coming off of three years of pandemic restrictions on film sets; it’s hard to fraternize with people on set when you’re limited by COVID-19 protocol.

Provided that no one’s feeling coerced and everything Grant’s longing for is occurring between consenting adults, though, he’s well within his rights to want a little more workplace camaraderie. Here’s hoping someone on his next movie is bold enough to put their phone down and invite him to play D&D.