Guess which scene in A Very English Scandal made Hugh Grant’s dad stop watching...
“I really am quite tired, I might go to bed...”
Hugh Grant caused quite a stir with his brilliant performance as gay MP Jeremy Thorpe in the recent BBC drama A Very English Scandal.
And his own Dad, Captain James Murrary Grant, who is 89, was keen to support him. But he took his fatherly enthusiasm only so far.
As Grant junior told the Edinburgh Television Festival: “My father had been very supportive and I go to see him every Sunday night and that first Sunday night it was broadcast he said ‘isn’t your poof film on tonight?’ – he’s ex military, you see. And he’s 89. And I said 'yes, Dad' and he said we should watch it, I have got a television set upstairs and we should go up and dust it off and watch it. And we did.
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“He’s very loyal, he said I’m determined to support you always. And we got as far as the Vaseline and he said: 'I really am quite tired, I might go to bed’.”
The scene in question occurred around half way through episode one when Grant's Thorpe suggests applying the lubrication. It was also the first sex scene between Grant and Ben Whishaw, who played Norman Scott, the man the Liberal leader later tried to have silenced.
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Whishaw was also Grant’s co-star in Paddington 2, another film that Grant Snr watched, providing the actor with another amusing festival anecdote.
“He’s great,” Grant said of his father. “He’s the man I took to the premiere of Paddington 2 and he said half way through the film: 'Is that a real bear?'”
