Hugh Grant appeared on Thursday’s The Drew Barrymore Show and revealed that the actress reached out to him amid his headline-making scandal in 1995, when he was arrested after being caught with sex worker Divine Brown on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. He was dating Elizabeth Hurley at the time.
Barrymore asked him if he remembered how they met, before sharing that she wrote him a letter before they actually met in person.
“Oh my god, you did, you were so nice!” Grant exclaimed as he recalled the letter. “It was during the dark days of my Divine Brown scandal, I was just an idiot. I was a grown-up idiot who got caught by the police. I was back in England with 5,000 members of the press around the borders of my farm and I opened a letter, from you, that was very supportive and nice, and it was very cheering up and I thought, ‘I love Drew Barrymore.’ Words of support from an actress I didn’t know in Hollywood was lovely, so, you will always have a place in my heart.”
Barrymore said she wrote him the letter because she knew how he was feeling given her own complicated childhood in the spotlight.
“I loved you so much, that whole incident I related in my own life, and I think that whether it’s an actor or politician or anything in between, we expect people to be infallible, perfect, never flawed, and God forbid we do anything in our personal lives that we would like to remain personal — but we don’t have that privilege at a certain point because the cat gets let out of the bag — and I just had to reach out to you,” she explained. “I just appreciated you and you were just the most charming human.”
Later, the two also revealed they once drunkenly made out when they ran into each other at a New York City restaurant.
Barrymore recalled, “One of the moments that I had the most moxie, and I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this, I walked into I think it was, like, The Waverly Inn, this was years ago, and I had a few drinks. And I walked in and I ran into you and instead of saying hello, I grabbed you by the collar and I fully started kissing you. … The expression [you had] was, ‘You’ve never greeted me that way before,’ and then you had a second thought and you were like, ‘You know, I’m not hating this.’ And then we flirted and then it was like, ‘OK, bye. See you soon.'”
Grant confirmed the story and said the incident was “really bizarre.”
“I was very drunk as well and I was with some very nice but not drunk studio executives from L.A., and they were very surprised,” he shared. Someone said, ‘Oh, there is Drew Barrymore,’ I get up to say hi and then we make out for 10 minutes and then I sit down, and we go on talking about the script.”
These days, 46-year-old Barrymore and 60-year-old Grant have both come a long way and are both parents. Barrymore is a mom to her daughters, Frankie and Olive, whom she shares with her ex-husband, Will Kopelman. Grant married television producer Anna Eberstein in 2018 and the two have three children together. He also shares two children with his ex, Tinglan Hong.
“I’m simultaneously utterly exhausted and miserable and clearly the happiest I’ve ever been,” Grant said about being a dad. “I see that now. It’s so nice, all those cliché’s are true, all that love is just so nice. Not just the children but the wife as well. I have a top wife, you must meet her, she’s terrifying … Much more manly than me but really cool and I’m happy.”
Back in 2016, Grant gave his unfiltered opinion on the concept of monogamy during his appearance on The Howard Stern Show.
“I can see the lovely aspect if you marry exactly the right person — your best friend and it’s cozy and it’s lovely,” he said at the time. “But, people make so many mistakes. Do I think human beings are meant to be in 40-year-long monogamous, faithful, relationships? No, No, No. Whoever said they were? Only the Bible or something.”
“I think there’s something unromantic about marriage,” he added. “You’re closing yourself off.”
But after marrying Eberstein, he had changed his tune.
