Hugh Grant has admitted that becoming a father aged 52 was “too late” in life.
The 64-year-old actor, who won rave reviews for his rare role in the new horror film Heretic, spoke about the exhaustion of welcoming his five children at a later age.
Appearing on the SmartLess podcast, Grant was asked how many children he has, to which he jokingly replied, “We think it’s five.”
“I had them much too old in life,” he conceded. “You know I started when I was 52.”
Grant shares three children – Blue, six, Lulu, eight, and son John Mungo, 12 – with his 41-year-old wife Anna Elisabet Eberstein. The pair married in 2018.
He also has a daughter Tabitha Xiao Xi, 13, and son Felix Chang Hong, 11, whom he shares with ex-partner Tinglan Hong, 45.
The actor, who welcomed his first child in 2011, joked that he needed a “long stint in a sanatorium or an abbey” due to becoming a father to five later in life.
He continued: “I often look at the abbey Maria lives in in the Sound of Music and wish I lived there.”
However, the actor said becoming a father gave him “heart” and “more layers”.
“I think I was a dried-up, middle-aged, golf-addicted Englishman,” he said. “Then I had children and suddenly I had heart and I had more layers, or something.”
The actor recently revealed that he decided to put an Austin Powers reference in his daughter Lulu’s name.
“We thought it might be nice for her when she was older if she could say in bars that her middle name is Danger. So her name is Lulu Danger Grant. Austin Powers, you know?” he said during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
In the first Austin Powers film, International Man of Mystery (1997), Powers (Mike Myers) corrects a man who asks him if his name is Danger Powers. When he tells him his name is, in fact, Austin Powers, the man replies: “It says here Danger Powers,” to which Austin looks at Elizabeth Hurley’s Vanessa Kensington and says: “No, no, no – Danger’s my middle name.”
Grant also revealed that he almost named his other daughter after a reference to his son’s favourite Despicable Me character – the Minion called Kevin.
“We asked her elder brother when she was on the way, ‘There’s a new baby coming along, what shall we call her?’ and he said ‘Kevin’, because that was his favourite Minion.
Grant continued: “And we did think about calling her Kevin, but then we said, ‘You’d better think of something else’, and he said ‘Blue’ because that was his favourite colour.”