Hugh Grant operates at a level of candor you simply don’t see in movie stars nowadays. Most of them are so meticulously media-trained that they could deliver a banal talk show anecdote in their sleep. Grant, meanwhile, has spent his Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves press tour giving quotes both curt and curmudgeonly, or sometimes roguishly rude. He’s retained a real DGAF attitude over the years, something that Hollywood simply doesn’t produce anymore.
Something else Hollywood is failing to produce is the classic on-set affair, according to Grant himself. During an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Grant lamented the evolution of the entertainment industry. “Films are so weird now. … You know, 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 that,” the actor said.
The reason that era came to an end is not, as you might think, due to getting woke, setting appropriate boundaries, or a level of skittishness in a post-#MeToo environment. No, according to Grant the reason more actors aren’t having sex with each other is because of their smartphones. “Really everyone goes home and looks at Twitter,” he said. “It’s so sad.”
Colbert questioned whether removing cell phones from the equation would lead to more affairs, which Grant affirmed. “Yeah, I think so. You know, [Quentin] Tarantino bans telephones from sets and quite right too, and the people there, they do all shag each other—or so I’m told.”
Trust Hugh Grant to have the good gossip! There’s one bit of context that must be acknowledged, however. Grant brought up this shortage of shagging in the first place after mentioning that Chris Pine had tried to rope him into an actual game of Dungeons & Dragons, which never panned out. Perhaps the phone addiction prevented them from ever getting together to play—or perhaps Grant finds the younger generation so disappointingly dorky that they’d rather launch a D&D campaign than a torrid affair. Whatever the case may be, it’s clear they just don’t make ’em like they used to.