The resident King of Rom-Com, aka Hugh Grant’s immensely loved career, has mostly revolved around romantic comedies in the ’90s, but the succeeding decade brought the actor into a new fold of cinema. The evolution from the floppy-haired, blue-eyed, introverted British boy to a man whose middle name is synonymous with sassy sardonic smugness was impeccable.
Roles were no longer limited to Grant being a hopelessly-in-love bookseller who is on the receiving end of one of the most famous confessions in the world of romance. But to that of a dapper British agent or a sleazy private investigator. And it is through Guy Ritchie’s lens that both of these versions of Grant came to the limelight.
Hugh Grant Recalls Filming For Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen
Guy Ritchie has a niche category in filmmaking that’s focused largely on the British mob and gangster genre. But the director can spin a story with the haunted intensity of an old wives’ tale with his uniquely fast-paced script, trademark filmography, and equally enchanting soundtracks to blend it all in perfectly.
Charlie Hunnam, a regular in Ritchie’s films, holds the director in high esteem calling him “eccentric, wonderful, and consistent,” and rightfully so, considering the masterpieces he has created with every project. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Hugh Grant’s opinion of the director. The actor, after having filmed The Gentlemen with Ritchie, spoke of his experience as a highly caricature-like event:
“[Guy] directs sort of on the hoof and I’m not entirely sure he had a script! He’d turn up on the day and say, ‘So what are we filming today?’ and someone would say, ‘Well, we’re doing this scene,’ and he’d take a look at it on the monitor and there was I, emoting and doing my best, long speeches which I’d carefully learned and he’d go, ‘Yeah, I don’t like any of that. Alright, let’s re-write that.’
And it was rather depressing but in the end, he’s sort of right because the camera likes things which are brand new, fresh, and not pre-rehearsed so the whole thing is slightly improvised on the day.”
Hugh Grant, who also paired up with Guy Ritchie on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., however, did go on to have a wonderful time on set despite the nightmarish filming routine. The director’s off-the-cuff method kept the film breezy and free-flowing, uncentered as it should be, considering the multiple subplots brewing all at once, with Grant’s Peter Fletcher orating the heft of it from the position of an unreliable narrator.
The Gentlemen: Yet Another Guy Ritchie Masterpiece
With Guy Ritchie at the helm and Matthew McConaughey in the lead, a film is already named successful before it rolls out into the theatres. The incredulous aspect of it all is that The Gentlemen manages to raise the bar, even by Ritchie’s standards. With increasingly bizarre subplots littering the narrative, the crime action comedy manages to immerse the audience in a joyride of twists sharper than the Stelvio Pass and thrills higher than the Formula Rossa.
Also read: REVIEW: Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen Is A Movie With Style
The Gentlemen, essentially narrated by Hugh Grant’s sleazy PI, Fletcher, follows McConaughey’s Mickey Pearson, the marijuana kingpin of the ‘Sticky Bush’ empire who decides to sell his business and retire, thus setting in motion an incredible series of unfortunate events with scheming, plotting, blackmailing, and backstabbing crooks running around town in an effort to gain a piece of the kingpin’s dynasty.
The Gentlemen is available for streaming on Netflix.
Source: Metro UK
