‘Hugh Grant? He’s a pain in the ass to work with’

Hugh Grant is “horrible” to work with and a “pain in the ass” according to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who stars with him in a new movie.

Speaking about the forthcoming film in which Grant plays the actor behind the voice of Tony the Tiger, the mascot for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Seinfeld revealed his experience of their working together on set.

He told the talk show host Jimmy Fallon: “We had lots of fights. He’s a pain in the ass to work with. He’s horrible.

“He tells you before you work with him: ‘You’re gonna hate this.’ And he’s so right.”

Not that it stopped Seinfeld, who directed Netflix’s Unfrosted, the unlikely story of the origin of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts, enjoying a memorable night out with Grant.

“We shot for 10 weeks, and that night that he and I had dinner – and we got drunk having dinner – that was the greatest night,” Seinfeld recalled to a shocked Fallon. “Because he’s so cool, and he’s that English thing, you know, that witty. He looks good in a jacket … he’s one of those guys. I love those guys.”

Seinfeld told Fallon that he did not originally have Grant in mind for the film but that the star of Four Weddings and A Funeral and Love Actually had insisted on auditioning for the part of Thurl Ravenscroft.

“I did not think of Hugh Grant for the part,” Seinfeld said. “[I imagined] a frustrated Shakespearean actor who has to play this embarrassing character to make his car payments.”

Seinfeld added: “But he called us and he said: ‘I want to be in the Pop-Tart movie.’ So I got the script and auditioned on my phone.

“So he did an audition on his phone – with a glass of wine in the other hand, by the way. Like I care what the audition was. I go: ‘Yeah, sure, you’re Tony the Tiger, sure.’”

This is far from the first time Grant has been described as challenging to work with.

His interview with supermodel Ashley Graham at last year’s Oscars was described as “curt” by The Washington Post. Speaking of his appearance as a little orange-faced Oompa-Loompa in Wonka he said: “It was like a crown of thorns ... I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.”

He has an excuse. In an interview with Elle in 2009, Grant told his interviewer: “I’m grumpy. My mother had a theory about Englishmen: They are permanently all two gin and tonics under par. They need two gin and tonics to become human.”

Pop-Tarts: a ‘perfect vision of the future’

Seinfeld told The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that the idea of a film about Pop-Tarts came to him during the pandemic.

“Stuck at home watching endless sad faces on TV, I thought this would be a good time to make something based on pure silliness,” he said.

He had previously based a stand-up routine on his reaction as an eight-year-old to first seeing the breakfast snack. “I was in the supermarket with my mother, and I was like: ‘Hold up, hold up – what the hell is that?’ ” he said. “When you open the packet, there’s two. Why? One’s not enough; three is too many – that’s why. It was perfect. Perfect vision of the future from Kellogg’s.”

In his skit, Seinfeld deconstructed the Pop-Tart as “a frosted fruit-filled heated rectangle in the same shape as the box it comes in, and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in”.