The 60-year-old actor is quarantined with three of his young children.
Hugh Grant has first-hand knowledge of the coronavirus, but that hasn't stopped him from cracking jokes. The 60-year-old Undoing star appeared on Tuesday night's The Late Show where he opened up to Stephen Colbert about contracting COVID-19 earlier this year.
"I had it, my wife [Anna Elisabet Eberstein] and I had it way back in the winter," he shared for the first time. "We have antibodies, so we're not going to get it, I don't think."
He added that he first came down with the disease in February. When host Colbert asked if Grant had gotten a test and a confirmed case of the coronavirus, he replied, "I've had an antibody test only a month ago. I still have those antibodies. So I know that's what it was. It became clear."
He went on to describe his symptoms in a comical manner.
"It started as just a very strange syndrome where I kept breaking into a terrible sweat, like a poncho of sweat, embarrassing really," he began. "And then my eyeballs felt about three sizes too big and then this feeling as though some enormous man was sitting on my chest, Harvey Weinstein or someone. I thought, 'I don't know what this is.'"
But it was the signature symptom that really alerted Grant to the fact that he was likely suffering from COVID-19.
"Then I was walking down a street one day and I thought, 'I can't smell a damn thing.' And you start to panic because by then people were just starting to talk about this as a symptom," he shared. "And I started sniffing flowers, nothing, and you get more and more desperate. I started sniffing in garbage cans and you want to sniff strangers' armpits because you just can't smell anything. I eventually went home and sprayed my wife's Chanel No. 5 directly into my face, couldn't smell a thing. I did go blind."
Grant noted that he is currently quarantining in London, which is in the middle of its second lockdown of the past eight months. And while spending time with the three youngest of his five children, the British actor has developed an affinity for Barbies.
"I've been locked up. The first time for three and a half months with a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old girl. It's been all about Barbies, I don't know if you have kids," he asked Colbert.
"I do, I have three, but they're past Barbie," the host replied.
"Is one ever past Barbie? Because I played with their Barbies," Grant admitted. "To start with you think, 'I'm just being nice.' And then I realized even after my girls went to bed, I was still playing with the Barbies."
Turns out, Grant's Barbie play got slightly heated.
"I enjoyed making them fall in love, they became very fond of each other, these two Barbies," he joked. "One of them was Barbie and one of them was Elsa from Frozen. They developed an affair. I took photographs of them kissing each other and sent them to friends, that's what happens in a really long lockdown."
RELATED CONTENT:
