Hugh Grant’s excruciatingly rude Oscars interview revealed his true self

As Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel and the producers of the ceremony congratulated themselves on a less eventful year – no slapping, the right Best Picture was announced and Cocaine Bear mauling Malala was an intended gag rather than some awful inadvertent tragedy – they may have been less amused by the moment that went viral on the night, and has continued to lead discussion ever since.

It’s a brief clip of the ABC presenter and model Ashley Graham interviewing the actor Hugh Grant on the red carpet, and her good-natured – if unavoidably banal – questions being met with a mixture of contempt and confusion by Grant, who then walks away at the end of the interview, rolling his eyes and looking aghast at the torment he has undergone.

Subsequently, opinion has divided evenly into “pro” and “anti” camps when it comes to the actor’s behaviour. Those who defend him note that Graham’s enthusiasm and cheerful attitude verge on the overwhelming, and that the actor responds tersely but accurately; when asked about his appearance in the recent film Glass Onion, he replies “I’m barely in it…I’m in it for about three seconds”, and when Graham excitedly enquires what clothes he’s wearing that evening, expecting some namedrop, the actor says simply “My suit”. Those who lambast him – including the Washington Post, which ran the headline “Is Hugh Grant rude or just British?” – criticise him for failing to enter into the spirit of the event and for being unnecessarily offhand with a younger woman who was merely doing her job.

Grant was in cheerier form later in the evening while presenting an Oscar with his Four Weddings and a Funeral co-star Andie MacDowell, in which he said he was there “to raise awareness of the vital importance of using a good moisturiser…I’ve never used one in my life.” He pointed to the “still stunning” MacDowell, and then gestured to himself and said, with well-honed self-deprecation: “Basically a scrotum.” The near-the-knuckle joke – it is hard to imagine many other leading men behaving in such a way – drew equal laughs and gasps from the audience, ensuring that there would be two bites of this particular cherry when it came to discussion of his antics the following day.

Grant’s presence at the Oscars was something of a surprise, given that he has never been nominated for an Academy Award – although he perhaps should have been, on multiple occasions – nor does he appear to enjoy the hoopla of fame. However, he also has promotional obligations to fulfil, hence his (perhaps reluctant) participation in what he dismissively called “Vanity Fair”.

He has two current pictures in which he plays villainous roles, Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre and the forthcoming fantasy epic Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves. Reviews have suggested that he steals both films from his co-stars with the practiced larceny that he has been displaying in a now four-decades spanning career, since he made his debut in the 1982 drama Privileged.

Had the then 22-year-old Grant been told what would await him over the coming years, he may have reacted with both pleasure and shock. He spent much of the Eighties and early Nineties taking roles that played up to (and occasionally against) his good looks, sometimes successfully – in the case of the superb Merchant-Ivory pictures Maurice and Remains of the Day – and sometimes less so: his understandably embarrassed performance in Ken Russell’s Grand Guignol shocker Lair of the White Worm is not one to be remembered with fondness. Then he was cast in the lead role of Four Weddings and a Funeral, when he was beginning to wonder if he should give up acting, and everything changed dramatically.

Looking back, the typecasting that Grant then endured for the best part of two decades as a stuttering, bumbling Englishman entirely played against what we now know of him as both a man and an actor. Had he played the role of Charles, a foppish upper-middle-class eternal bachelor, and then taken on the character parts that have defined the rest of his career, he would have had a very different and probably more interesting time. Instead he was strait-jacketed into playing people who were almost diametrically opposed to what he was like offscreen.

When, notoriously, he was caught in a compromising situation with the sex worker Divine Brown in June 1995, it shocked those who had always believed that the actor was a real-life version of his Four Weddings role. Subsequently, it seems less of a surprise; nobody now expects him to be a squeaky-clean role model, which remains part of his charm, or dangerous charisma.

He eventually broke out, as he aged and the leading man roles slipped away. Although the 2012 David Mitchell adaptation Cloud Atlas was not a success, it at least rescued Grant from the bondage of romantic comedies he had been mired in for decades, and since then the actor has embraced character roles, usually villainous ones, with gusto.

He was peerless as Jeremy Thorpe in the TV series A Very English Scandal; scene-stealing as the vain faded actor Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2 (oh that he had made a cameo during the Queen’s Jubilee skit!); and both moving and droll in Florence Foster Jenkins as Meryl Streep’s proud, devoted and adulterous husband Raleigh St Clair: a performance that made people remember how talented an actor he is, as if there had ever been any doubt. Rightly, he was Bafta-nominated for all three roles, and should have won, too. He was also a hugely effective bastard in the so-so Nicole Kidman drama series The Undoing, playing a straightforwardly villainous role without any kind of winking at the audience, and demonstrating his remarkable range in the process.

Yet amidst the continuing success of his revitalised career are continued suggestions that Grant the man is difficult, to put it mildly. Often, he is the first to admit his bad behaviour. In a recent interview with Total Film, he said that, on the set of Dungeons and Dragons: “I lost my temper with a woman in my eyeline on day one. I assumed she was some executive from the studio who should have known better. Then it turns out that she’s an extremely nice local woman who was the chaperone of the young girl. Terrible. A lot of grovelling.” He then summarised the matter with a typical joke: “I did a Christian Bale”, he remarked, alluding to the notoriously fiery actor’s temper tantrum on the set of Terminator: Salvation.

However, Grant himself has acquired a reputation over the years for dealing with those he finds tiresome with distinct impatience. The Oscars interview may have demonstrated this to spectacularly public effect, but it is of a piece with a story recounted by The Fence magazine, in which the actor was said to remark to a part-time Christmas tree seller that his job was “s---”, that buying trees was “a waste of time” and refused to pay full price, before saying, when it was time to write down his name on the label: “Well, you know that of course.”

While the former tree salesman recalled: “It made my skin crawl”, those who were not present might find something bleakly amusing in the idea of a multimillionaire, world-famous actor lambasting an unfortunate festive worker and attempting to get a discount in the process. Somehow it is hard to imagine, say, Colin Firth doing so.

Before his spectacular renaissance, Grant was heavily involved with the Hacked Off pressure group, which arose from the phone-hacking hearings in 2011 and has sought to make the press more accountable. His dealings with the media have always been a strange mixture of the candid and the offhand, as if he loathes dealing with journalists but cannot help himself from giving endlessly quotable copy to them, on the occasions that he deigns to be interviewed. He’s a hilarious guest on chat shows, displaying a degree of irreverence that demonstrates his peerless comic timing as well, apparently, as a lack of concern as to whether he puts his foot in it or not.

His colourful private life has been well documented, much to his annoyance, but then he has taken roles – most notably the cad to end all cads, the publisher Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones’s Diary – that take delight in playing with his offscreen image, and invite the audience to wonder who the ‘real’ Grant is: a stammering fop, a dashing rake or simply the most accomplished actor of his generation, a man who can play the highest tragedy or the broadest comedy and do either without breaking a sweat.

Perhaps Grant could have been more gentlemanly and forthcoming to Graham at the Oscars. It would not have killed him to be pleasant, polite and witty; after all, anyone well-known appearing at the ceremony knows that they are likely to be interviewed, and it would not have been beyond his abilities to come up with some suitably droll one-liners, delivered charmingly.

But it is also quite clear that, at the age of 62, the self-described scrotum-faced actor is weary of being nice to people. Many will sigh and tut at his public rudeness, and they are entitled to. Many others, meanwhile, will secretly wish that they had the chutzpah to behave in such a fashion when in an uncomfortable situation, and this take-no-prisoners, I-don’t-care attitude is why Hugh John Mungo Grant, erstwhile rom-com leading man, continues to enthral and fascinate, long after most of his peers have long ceased to be remotely interesting.