14. Nine Months
This 1995 comedy was supposed to be Grant’s big studio-movie follow-up to Four Weddings and a Funeral—and it was, only it hit theaters barely two weeks after the actor (who at the time had been dating Elizabeth Hurley for years) was arrested for soliciting a prostitute in Hollywood. He later pleaded no contest to lewd conduct with a prostitute.
“It did well, but it might have done better had I been better, and had I not been arrested the day before it came out. I screwed it up,” Grant cracked in the 2019 BBC2 special Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen.
But Nine Months didn’t make the bottom of this list because of the actor’s off-screen peccadilloes. Rather, it’s because Samuel Faulkner, a child psychologist who starts to unravel when his live-in girlfriend Rebecca (Julianne Moore) tells him she’s pregnant—spoiler alert, he’s just really afraid he’s going to be a bad dad—is selfish and ridiculous until he redeems himself at the 11th hour and becomes perfect husband-and-father material.
Thanks to the supporting cast of Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack, Jeff Goldblum and Robin Williams, the movie is funny (and it was far from a flop, earning $138 million at the box office), but the so-called rom part of this rom-com is a bust.
“Brilliant actress, loathes me,” Grant said of Moore (presumably facetiously, maybe?) when asked by Elle magazine to share some thoughts on his leading ladies (a trip down interview-memory lane he was reminded of on The Graham Norton Show).
