Introduction

Abstract

On 26 November 2019, at the height of the bitterly fought General Election campaign which saw a landslide win for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, Hugh Grant tweeted: ‘Young people – today is your last chance. Register to vote or I will make another enchanting romantic comedy. #registertovote TACTICALLY’. (Grant 2019). The quip neatly encapsulates the actor’s career trajectory, and underlines some of the key tensions and facets within his star persona that have drawn our interest in this issue: the trademark selfdeprecation (with its strong connection to Englishness – more on this below), and the simultaneous disavowal and embracing of the genre he is most associated with in favour of a higher-brow political engagement. Like his romcom peer Matthew McConaughey, Grant had also very publicly moved away from the romantic comedy: his turn as a villainous washed-up actor in the box-office-hit Paddington 2 (2017) had sparked rumours of an Oscar campaign (Ehrlich 2018), and he had received significant plaudits for his role as disgraced politician Jeremy Thorpe in Russell T. Davies and Stephen Frears’s A Very English Scandal (2018), encompassing his first Emmy nomination and nods for the BAFTA TV, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards. This pair of acclaimed performances was accompanied by an intense promotional campaign (e.g. his appearances on The Graham Norton Show 2017, Late Night with Seth Meyers 2018, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert 2018), in which Grant reinforced his ‘reluctant actor’ persona (York 2018), while also offering new insights into the relationship between his off-screen life and his newfound enjoyment of acting. The media attention only intensified when Grant interpreted the charmingly murderous Jonathan Fraser, opposite Nicole Kidman in HBO’s The Undoing (2020). Despite many reviewers remarking on the hammy plot, Grant’s villainous turn was widely praised, often seen as the main strength of the show (Baldwin 2020, Jones 2020, Tellerico 2020). With The Undoing, Grant replicated the nominations at the Emmy, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, amongst the others, although once again a win eluded him. Interest in Hugh Grant has by no means diminished since, as recently demonstrated by the rumours spread by the British tabloid Daily Mirror (Pryer 2022), quickly debunked by the actor via Twitter (Grant 2022), that he would have played the 14 incarnation of the titular character in a ‘Marvel-style’ revamp of Doctor Who. It was this career renaissance, and his increased political engagement, which sparked our interest in this Special Issue, as we first started to work on it in 2019. As his performances in Paddington 2 and A Very English Scandal started to garner plaudits, critics began to talk of a ‘Hugh Grant renaissance’ (a ‘Grantaissance’?), not dissimilar from the McConaissance (Syme 2016) that the other romcom leading man had experienced only a