Oh, bugger! Hugh Grant has worked with so many famous actresses that apparently he’s forgotten what they look like! The Man From U.N.C.L.E. actor failed to recognize his Bridget Jones’s Diary costar Renée Zellweger when shown a photo of her from the eyes up during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live on Thursday, August 11.
It all went down when host Andy Cohen asked Grant, 55, to identify his former leading ladies — by only seeing the top half of their faces. “Who is the one second from the right, because I’ve never seen her before in my life,” the British star said, according to the Daily Mail. When informed that it was Zellweger, he said: “Oh, Renée!”
Last week, Zellweger bashed speculation about her appearance in an op-ed for The Huffington Post. “Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” she wrote in the piece, titled “We Can Do Better.”
“Although we have evolved to acknowledge the importance of female participation in determining the success of society, and take for granted that women are standard bearers in all realms of high profile position and influence, the double standard used to diminish our contributions remains,” she added.
Grant and Zellweger, 47, have a long history together. They played Daniel Cleaver and Bridget Jones in the 2001 comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel, 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Daniel was her bad-boy boss who cheated on her. He later got into an epic fistfight with his ex best friend Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who also fell in love with Bridget.
Zellweger and Firth, 55, reprised their roles in the upcoming movie Bridget Jones’s Baby. Grant, however, decided to skip the reunion.
“They did come to me a couple of years ago and they had a lovely idea,” Grant told Cohen, 48, on Thursday. “I’m particularly difficult and queenie when it comes to scripts. I couldn’t quite make the script work for me so they then made it without me and I’m sure it’s brilliant.”
When asked if he thinks he will regret his decision, Grant quipped: “It depends how much money it makes.”
Bridget Jones’s Baby hits theaters on September 16.
