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Hugh Grant In Real UK Political Activist Role

By TIM ADLER in London | Wednesday October 5, 2011 @ 3:56am PDTTags: Hugh Grant, News Corporation, Phone Hacking, Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch

Hugh Grant, as Deadline revealed over the summer, backed out of replacing Charlie Sheen as the star of Two and a Half Men at the last minute. Now he is filming Cloud Atlas with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Jim Broadbent for the Wachowski brothers. But he has reinvented himself over here as a justice campaigner on behalf of celebrities and civilians like himself who had their phones hacked in the News Corp scandal. He has always been ambivalent about being a movie star, and has long talked about doing something different. Asked if he had been wasting his life until now, Grant told The Guardian: “That is harsh, but yes. If I had been a complete failure until the age of 51, I would definitely go along with you but I suppose I have had a few successes. But yes, you are right. I have squandered my life.”

Britain is taking him seriously on the hacking scandal. Grant was giving interviews before meeting Prime Minister David Cameron in Manchester last night. He said he wanted to hear directly from the politician too close to Rupert Murdoch’s organisation. Following the meeting, Grant said that Cameron made “the right noises but I expected him to make the right noises”. Grant alleges that Cameron must have known disgraced Murdoch editor Andy Coulson oversaw a culture of phone hacking at the News of the World before hiring him as his chief PR flack. why he accepted Coulson’s explanation that a lone rogue employee had hacked phones under his News of the World editorship. Grant even warned UK Chancellor George Osborne ahead of time that it would be a “catastrophic mistake” to hire Coulson. Grant told The Times of London that he found himself sitting next to Osborne at a dinner party and had to be calmed down by his hostess because he got so angry over it.

Grant says there’s more to be revealed about the relationship between senior politicians and the Murdoch press. He told the Independent: “The more that comes out about all this, the more we will learn about the true nature of the Prime Minister’s relationship with the Murdoch organisation. What I hear on the Cotswold grapevine [the tony Oxford area where Cameron and ex-News International CEO Rebekah Brooks both live] is that the relationship was sinisterly cosy to a deeply unhealthy and unattractive degree.”

The actor expresses doubts whether the UK government has any real appetite for media reform “or whether their instinct is to push the whole thing into the long grass and go back into the nice cosy old routine of being in bed with Murdoch”. And he thought Rupert Murdoch’s performance before politicians investigating the hacking scandal in July was “phoney”. Grant explained, “Speaking as a bad actor, it was easy to spot a bad performance … my sources tell me he was as a sharp as a tack when they saw him a week or two before.”

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Paul Feig Exits ‘Bridget Jones 3′; Universal Looking For Brit Director For January Start

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Tuesday October 4, 2011 @ 12:49pm PDTTags: Bridesmaids, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Jon Hamm, Judd Apatow, Melissa McCarthy, Paul Feig, Renee Zellweger, Universal Pictures, Working Title Films
Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Universal Pictures and Working Title Films will need a new director for Bridget Jones 3, and I hear they want a Brit. Paul Feig has withdrawn after developing the most recent draft of the script with the intention to direct. I’m told that both sides agreed it didn’t work out and that maybe this is just a quintessential British comedy that needs a British sensibility. They will set a director soon as they are still slated to start production in January, with Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant all eager to return.

Feig has enough to keep him busy at Universal, where he just directed the sleeper hit Bridesmaids. He’s got two projects there including an untitled comedy that he’s writing to direct for producer Judd Apatow, with the hope that Jon Hamm will play a guy obsessed with a woman who’ll be played by Melissa McCarthy. That certainly puts much of the Bridesmaids team together, and it will have to do until the studio figures out a way to get moving on a Bridesmaids sequel after the first one grossed $286 million worldwide on a $32 million budget. Read More »

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Hacking Update: UK Seeks Tighter Media Controls In Wake Of Scandal

By THE DEADLINE TEAM | Wednesday September 14, 2011 @ 4:49pm PDTTags: Hugh Grant, J.K. Rowling, Jeremy Hunt, News Corp, News of the World, Rupert Murdoch

Chase Carey Says His Role “Hasn’t Changed” With Hacking Scandal

The fallout from News Corp’s phone-hacking scandal continued to reverberate today. U.K. Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt said he was backing new legislation that would tighten controls on cross-media ownership. Under the proposal, rolled out at the Royal Television Society Convention in Cambridge, politicians would be barred from approving major media deals and inquiries on media plurality could be launched by regulators Ofcom and the Competition Commission without the trigger of a takeover bid. Hunt said that News Corp’s near takeover of BSkyB in July, abandoned in the scandal’s wake, convinced him changes were needed. “I was very conscious in the recent BSkyB bid that however fairly I ran the process, people were always going to question my motives,” he said. Read More »

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Celebs Fight Murdochs Over Newspaper Phone Hacking

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Friday July 22, 2011 @ 1:02pm PDTTags: Hugh Grant, Hugh Grant Phone Hacker, Jude Law, News of the World, News of the World Hacking, News of the World Phone-Hacking Scandal, Rupert Murdoch, Sienna Miller

Hollywood isn’t famous for courage — especially when it means standing up to someone as powerful as Rupert Murdoch who owns one of the biggest movie and television … Read More »

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DONE DEAL: Ashton Kutcher New Star Of ‘Two & A Half Men’ Replacing Charlie Sheen

By NIKKI FINKE AND NELLIE ANDREEVA | Thursday May 12, 2011 @ 6:30pm PDTTags: Ashton Kutcher, Hugh Grant, Two and a Half Men

UPDATE 6:30 PM: We’ve just received word that negotiations have concluded, marking That ’70s Show co-star Ashton Kutcher’s return to television after a brief movie career. He is replacing Charlie Sheen in Two And A Half Men. The deal made sense for series producer Warner Bros which already had an overall with Kutcher’s Katalyst production banner. In fact, an hour later, Ashton announced he was joining the show by tweeting to his 6.7 million Twitter followers: “What’s the square root of 6.25?”

Names like Woody Harrelson, Rob Lowe, John Stamos, and Jeremy Piven circulated in the blogosphere as possible replcements. But until this week, with Deadline’s scoop that the show was in final negotiations with Hugh Grant, there had been nothing concrete going on with any specific actor. Co-creator and executive producer Chuck Lorre only wanted to continue the show “if he can find the right actor and get excited about that,” sources told Deadline. What mattered most to Lorre was that Sheen’s replacement be “somebody Chuck can work with” after butting heads with Charlie for years in a situation that escalated into a very public and nasty feud this spring.

All along insiders at Warner Bros and CBS had been saying that they were going after “an A-lister” as the new star of the top-rated sitcom after Sheen was fired. The feeling was to contract with “an exciting actor who’d never done TV before,” and CBS chief Leslie Moonves especially was encouraging Lorre et al to “swing high”. As one insider told Deadline, “Everybody wants show back and to support Chuck creatively and to do something the advertising community will feel good about. The only issue was whether everyone could get the show up and running and right fast enough to make this fall’s schedule.”

Because Kutcher is both a producer as well as an actor, he has a good reputation as a responsible showbiz professional. Sure, the producers’ top choice, Hugh Grant, would have been a swing for the fences — a real coup that could have bought the aging comedy series another 3 or 4 seasons on the air. By contrast, Ashton, whose movie career went from warm to ice cold in just a few years, is a solid base hit.

PREVIOUS 4 PM: CBS’ Leslie Moonves is loving this media frenzy over Charlie Sheen’s potential replacement on Two and a Half Men. The latest name to enter the rumor mill, that of Ashton Kutcher today, is noteworthy. Like Grant, he has big screen rom-com credentials which could help attract women to watch the show. But he also has multicamera sitcom experience from That ’70s Show that would come in handy. And last but not least, he has 6.7 million Twitter followers. That’s more than the audience for the Two and a Half Men repeat this past Monday. Read More »

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MYSTERY MAN REVEALED: Hugh Grant Almost Replaced Charlie Sheen On ‘Men’

By NIKKI FINKE AND NELLIE ANDREEVA | Wednesday May 11, 2011 @ 3:46pm PDTTags: CBS, Charlie Sheen, Chuck Lorre, Hugh Grant, TV syndication, Two and a Half Men, Warner Bros

EXCLUSIVE… UPDATE WITH MORE DETAILS, 3:45 PM: We hear that the idea of Hugh Grant as a replacement for Charlie Sheen in Two And A Half Men was first pitched to CBS boss Les Moonves and CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler about a month ago. After a couple of weeks sorting out the Sheen lawsuit fallout, the two execs blessed the plan and Grant was approached by the producers at Warner Bros. We hear Hugh flew in and had 2 creative meetings. Things were progressing and he had all but a completed deal when he backed out unexpectedly. ‘It was not the money. He didn’t want to do TV because those 24 episodes are a grind and a lot of work. At the end he couldn’t get his head around doing a series.” Another insider tells us that, if Grant committed, “the show could have gotten another 3 to 4 more seasons”.

PREVIOUS FROM NIKKI FINKE: I’ve learned that one-time bad boy Hugh Grant was deep into final negotiations to replace Charlie Sheen as the lead on Two And A Half Men until he pulled out last night at the last minute due to creative differences. Insiders tell me he’d been offered more than $1 million an episode [UPDATE: but Warner Bros sources are now saying it was not that much], which is the sort of $25M-a-year payday Grant doesn’t get from movies anymore. All along insiders at Warner Bros and CBS had been saying that they were going after “an A-lister” as the new star of the top-rated sitcom after Sheen was fired, and Hugh sure fits the bill. (Let me tell you, I would have watched that show!) CBS has been working hard to announce the return of the show and its new star at next week’s upfronts. Maybe Grant will reconsider. Let’s hope. But it’s a decision that will affect not just CBS’ Nielsen ratings and advertising revenue but also billions of dollars of future syndication contracts for Warner Bros Television.

Insiders have been explaining to me that, at first, executive producer and co-creator Chuck Lorre wasn’t sure if he wanted to proceed with the show after Sheen’s implosion. With three successful sitcoms on CBS — Two And A Half Men, Mike & Molly, and The Big Bang Theory — Lorre was enjoying only showrunning two of them. But the problem, and it’s a very nice problem to have, is that there is so much moolah at stake because Two And A Half Men is a multibillion-dollar asset in syndication on terrestrial broadcast stations like the Fox station group, on cable with FX, as well as via multi foreign and DVD deals. The terrestrial contracts called for the stations to have to carry the show as long as Sheen was “of the essence” of each episode. Once Sheen left, the stations could get out of the contract. The hope was and still is that his replacement will be so compelling that the stations will want to continue the contract. Not so with the cable and foreign deals, where Charlie was not “of the essence”, meaning it didn’t matter to the contracts whether Sheen was in the show or not as long as the sitcom’s concept remained similar. This is why everybody have been working so hard to find a replacement, with names like Woody Harrelson, Rob Lowe, John Stamos and Jeremy Piven circulating in the blogosphere. But until now, with Deadline’s news about Hugh Grant, there’s been nothing concrete about actual negotiations going on with any specific actor to replace Sheen. Read More »

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Hugh Grant Takes On Animated Role In Aardman’s ‘The Pirates! Band Of Misfits’

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Thursday May 5, 2011 @ 8:08am PDTTags: Aardman, Brendan Gleeson, David Tennant, Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, Martin Freeman, Richard Curtis, Salma Hayek
Mike Fleming

Sony Pictures Animation and Aardman Animations announced they’ve set Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, Brian Blessed, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey and Ashley Jenson to provide the voices in The Pirates! Band of Misfits, … Read More »

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A 14-Year ‘Gambit’ Finally Provides a Big Payoff For Producer Mike Lobell

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Thursday May 5, 2011 @ 6:58am PDTTags: Aaron Sorkin, Adam Ripp, Ben Kingsley, Cameron Diaz, CBS Films, Colin Firth, Ethan Coen, Hugh Grant, Jennifer Aniston, Joel Coen, Meg Ryan, Michael Caine, Michael Hoffman, Mike Lobell, Reese Witherspoon, Rob Paris, Roeg Sutherland, Sean Penn, Shirley MacLaine
Mike Fleming

Production begins today on Gambit, a caper comedy that stars Colin Firth as a London art curator who plans to con England’s richest man into buying a phony Monet painting. To do it, he enlists a Texas steer roper (Cameron … Read More »

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Hugh Grant Turns Tables On UK Journo Phone Hacker

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Monday April 11, 2011 @ 12:36pm PDTTags: Hugh Grant, Hugh Grant Phone Hacker, News of the World, Phone Hacking, UK Cell Phone Hacking
Mike Fleming

Hugh Grant, one of the many celebrities whose phone conversations were tapped and used for UK tabloid fodder, turned the tables. He secretly taped a former journalist from News of the World who tailed him when his car broke down, … Read More »

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Tom Harper To Direct ‘Lost For Words’

By TIM ADLER in London | Friday July 30, 2010 @ 3:41am PDTTags: Hugh Grant, Romantic Comedy, Susanne Bier, Tom Cruise, Working Title Films

EXCLUSIVE: The young British director has just come off directing the This Is England TV series for Channel 4. Working Title is planning to shoot Lost For Words in January. Tom Cruise was going to play the lead at one … Read More »

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