Hugh Grant

Cosmo: Where do you live now?

Hugh Grant: I live in London, like I've always lived.

C: You and [longtime girlfriend] Elizabeth Hurley are fixing up a house?

HG: Well, as you may know by now, seeing as you can't pick up a paper without reading about the intimate secrets of my life, we have bought a house, and it is horrible. I know it's pathetic to use an interior designer, but we were so busy there was no way we could do it ourselves, so we hired these guys, and I might as well have just written a check for 200,000 pounds and flushed it down the loo.

C: Really? So you have to do it over?

HG: Yeah. We're redoing what they screwed up.

C: You're not living there?

HG: Well, Elizabeth lives there full time, and I have three quarters of my person there. A quarter's still in the flat just around the corner. I go there to watch the football, drink beer.

C: Soccer you mean?

HG: Yeah.

C: I just want to make sure that I don't say you're a football fan and find out that you have no idea what football is.

HG: I don't have any idea what football is.

C: So are you gonna move the other quarter in?

HG: Oh yeah, yeah, shortly. I just have to fix some of the little luxuries. Well, like the shower that — I don't know how they did it — but it smells of dead people. They seem to have connected it directly to the main sewer of London.

C: Is this the first time you and Elizabeth have lived together?

HG: We've lived together for twelve years, but in a tiny flat the size of this room. And seeing as Elizabeth's clothes alone take up six rooms this size, we knew we had to move.

C: Are you guys looking to get married?

HG: Oh please.

C: Is she a clothes horse?

HG: Well, yeah. And every designer in the world sends her sixteen new dresses every day, and she won't throw anything away.

C: Does she say to you, "Should I wear this dress?"

HG: Um, up to a point. I get to have an opinion on the shoes. She'll come in wearing a see-through dress with a different shoe on each foot, and say, "Which shoe?"

C: And you say, "Who's gonna notice your feet?"

HG: Well, it's worse than that, because there's a correct answer to the question. A woe betide me if I get it wrong. I'm getting good. When my acting career collapses completely I will be a stylist. I used to have big platform shoes in the 70's at school. I had to, because I was such a late developer. I used to go out with these sexy fifteen-year-olds, and I was sort of four feet tall and looked like I was seven.

C: You didn't grow until you were older?

HG: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I reached puberty at about 32, so...

C: But did girls like you then?

HG: Well, they liked me for one date, and then I think they realized that they were going out with a child. Particularly if my hair was short, I looked ... it was like they were out with a toddler. I remember one terrible date. I went out with a very sexy girl on a double date [to the movies] with my mate and his girl. I'd had a haircut, and I felt like a toddler. Three quarters of the way into the film, she finally grabbed my arm and stuck it around her neck. And I made the huge mistake of thinking the right thing to do was to bring my arm all the way back, so that she'd be sort of cuddled. And then I remember when I looked down to kiss her, her eyes were bulging slightly, and she was choking.

C: Switching gears, what's an embarrassing thing you've done?

HG: Oh God. I remember having a very embarrassing story at the Venice Film Festival, when we took [the 1987 movie] Maurice there. There we were in a big gala screening, sitting in the front row and I was wearing a suit I'd had since I was about thirteen which simply didn't fit. But it was my only suit. And so five minutes into the film I undid the top of my trousers, they were just too tight. At the end of the film everyone stands up and applauds. And we were to stand up and accept the applause. And I stood up and turned around, but by now the fly had undone completely, and I was totally unaware. I remember that being a bad, bad experience.