Hugh Grant says he made his ‘hundreds’ of kids watch Paddington and they ‘hate’ it

Hugh Grant has rightly declared Paddington 2 as a masterpiece – though his children appear to disagree.

In the film, the actor steals every scene he’s in as a disguise-wearing criminal who performs an extravagant musical number in prison. It’s a delight.

In an interview with Late Night host Seth Meyers, the actor recalled a disastrous screening of Paul King’s 2018 film that he organised for his family:

I set up a special screening for them. That takes a whole cinema, I have hundreds of children. I got them in there and they pretty much hated it. They kept whispering to me, “Why are you in it so much?”

How can they not love Paddington?

Do these children just have bad taste or do they hate pure joy that much? We’ll never know. Grant jokingly added that he forces his kids to like it or else they “won’t get fed”.

Grant also divulged how traumatic it was to work with Ben Whishaw, the voice of Paddington, in the mini-series A Very English Scandal. “I had to do a whole publicity tour with Ben and he became Paddington to me,” he said. “So then to have to basically rape him and then try to kill him for the whole autumn of 2017 was weird.”

The actor has never been reluctant to proclaim his love for the world’s favourite marmalade-eating bear. Last year, he told Vanity Fair that Paddington 2 was “the best film he’s ever been in.” (Sorry to Notting Hill.)