“In Coney Island, New York, I was shooting a film with Sandra Bullock and at lunch time they all said, ‘Oh, well, you must have a Nathan’s hot dog. They’re famous,’” the actor shares during an interview on The Late Late Show With James Corden. “Right-o, you know, when in Rome. So I went off and had a Nathan’s hot dog and it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. So I thought I’ll have another!”
Grant loved those hot dogs so much he ended up eating four in a row. “But what no one explained to me is that there’s some ingredient that has an effect on a digestive system, famously with these hot dogs. So I was, to put it delicately, very late back into the make-up trailer,” he reveals. “And when I got there, they said, ‘Are you OK?’ and I said, ‘Well I’m not sure my Nathan’s hot dogs really agreed with me.’ And it was a Brooklyn make-up girl and she said, ‘What, did it blow your ass out?’ I said, ‘Yes, it blew my ass out, yes.’”
Ah, the great American pastime! Really, though, Grant can’t stop being ever-so-droll every time the camera turns on. Later in the episode, he’s delightfully naughty about co-star Chris Pine choosing to eat cattle testicles rather than name his least favorite Hugh Grant film. For the man himself, it’s an easy choice: “I would happily shred my IMDb page because I specialized in being bad for decades, really,” he said during the game of “Spill Your Guts Or Fill Your Guts.” “As you know, as someone in the industry, it’d be one thing for me to say I was bad, but I can’t bring down the rest of the wonderful colleagues by saying it was bad, so that’s my dilemma.”
Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts w/ Hugh Grant & Chris Pine
However, rather than take a taste of mayonnaise-and-worm shepherd’s pie, he points the finger at The Lady And The Highwayman, a “low budget” film in which he plays a (supposedly) sexy highwayman. “Bad wig, bad hat. I looked like Deputy Dawg,” Grant recalls. “When I’m tense — I don’t know if this happens to you when you’re acting—my voice goes up two octaves. So Deputy Dawg would come leaping out of trees when a character went past and go, ‘Stand and deliver!’ It’s poor.” May the fountain of Hugh Grant Hollywood anecdotes never run dry.