Hugh Grant is having a Hugh Grant moment in a luxury hotel suite near the tip of Lower Manhattan. Greeting a guest with an offer of refreshment, he hovers over an espresso maker, holding a delicate demitasse cup.
The mischievous machine, though, spews more liquid than the cup can contain, and soon Grant is left standing there, like one of those charmingly thwarted gentlemen in a Hugh Grant comedy, watching a minor mechanical catastrophe unfold. A few words of pained regret are muttered; a larger coffee cup is quickly secured, and with an apologetic look and minimal spillage, the calamity is averted.
It's an endearing way to be welcomed into the company of Grant, who at 55 is still sleek and, with the exception of a few more creases in his classic leading-man features, boyishly handsome. "It was not my ambition to be a professional actor," the Oxford-educated Grant says, reminiscing about how he got from there to here for his latest venture, co-starring with Meryl Streep in a quirky new Stephen Frears film, Florence Foster Jenkins, about a tone-deaf would-be opera singer and the man who reinforces her illusions.
There are, it seems, little accidents in Grant's daily life, and more consequential ones. He'd done some college acting while reading English at Oxford, he says, and even appeared in a student film that he forgot all about as soon as he left school, when he was contemplating an additional degree. "After I graduated that summer," he recalls, "someone called up and said, 'We're showing that film tonight in London, in Piccadilly. Come and have a look.'
"So I remember ... watching it, and then there were these agents afterward who said, 'Uh, hey, do you want to be an actor?' I said, 'No thank you. I want to do this history of art degree.' And then I thought, maybe I'll do it for a year because I have no money. And then one year turned into 35."