Hugh Grant shocks audience with joke about sex worker arrest at new film premiere

The actor was arrested for engaging in a public act of ‘lewd conduct’ in 1995

Hugh Grant made a surprising quip about his infamous 1995 sex scandal at the American Film Institute premiere of Heretic on Thursday (24 October).

The Four Weddings and a Funeral star, 64, was arrested by Los Angeles police for participating in “lewd conduct” in a public place with a sex worker named Divine Brown. He was in a long-term relationship with actor/model Liz Hurley at the time.

Grant, who stars in Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s forthcoming psychological horror Heretic as Mr Reed– a sinister man who traps two young women in his home after they try to convert him to Mormonism, referenced the incident on stage when asked to say a few words by the director.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Beck said: “This movie theatre is absolutely magical to us…It’s a beautiful thing that there’s hundreds of us here, many of us are strangers...First and foremost, thank you so much for showing up for preserving the cinematic experience.”

Woods then requested: “Mr Hugh Grant, will you just say a few words please?”

Grant only took to the microphone for 57 seconds but his words had a lasting effect on the audience, who erupted into laughter.

“I have nothing interesting to add,” he said. “Except that it is very nice to be here. Hollywood Boulevard has always been a lucky place for me.”

Hugh Grant as Mr Reed in ‘Heretic’ (A24)

The actor’s arrest came one year after he shot to fame in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and he later called the incident a moment of “insanity”. He has rarely addressed it in the decades since.

In a statement at the time, Grant wrote: “I have hurt people I love and embarrassed people I work with. For both things, I am more sorry than I can ever possibly say.”

The now-defunct News of the World reportedly paid Brown $100,000 for her story, which included her claim that Grant told her: “I always wanted to sleep with a Black woman. That’s my fantasy.”

When Hurley eventually broke her silence on the event, two months after Grant’s arrest, she said that “she felt like she had been shot” on hearing he had slept with a sex worker.

Grant in his notorious 1995 mugshot (Getty Images)

Grant was ordered to pay a fine of $1,000 and go on an Aids education programme.

Back in 2021, the Bridget Jones actor said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast that, when he was caught with Brown, he was “not in a good frame of mind” after attending a screening of his romantic comedy, Nine Months.

“Everybody in it was brilliant but I was so atrocious that I was not in a good frame of mind,” he said.

“I had a Ken Russell kind of lunch and one thing led to another.”