Hugh Grant imagines heartbreak scenario for his 'Notting Hill' character

In 1999, Hugh Grant's hapless but handsome bookseller Will Thacker inexplicably married Julia Roberts' Hollywood starlet Anna Scott.

And at the end of Notting Hill, the pair, in wedded bliss, are expecting a baby after their on-again, off-again shenanigans.

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But ever the optimist, Grant has said that he thinks that the relationship would have ended in abject disaster.

“I’m sure they were all disasters,” he told Collider of his rash of rom-com relationships.

“Those films were all lies. I’m sure that my character in Notting Hill and Julia Roberts’ character have been through the ugliest imaginable divorce with really expensive, nasty lawyers.”

In a separate interview via the HBO Twitter feed (while promoting new series The Undoing), he added he’d love to do a sequel to some of his rom-com movies, “to prove the terrible lie that they all were”.

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“I’d like to do me and Julia and the hideous divorce that ensued,” he says. “Children involved in a tug of love, floods of tear, psychologically scarred forever.”

The movie, penned by Richard Curtis and directed by Roger Michell, arrived at the peak of the rom-com era.

However, the movie, which also starred Hugh Bonneville, Rhys Ifans and Emma Chambers, was criticised for its sanitised view of only the wealthy parts of the London neighbourhood from which it took its name.

“Only Curtis could write a movie about Notting Hill, London's most diverse borough, and not feature a single black face in it,” wrote Tim Adams in the Guardian.

Nonetheless, it was a huge hit, making $364m (over £280m) at the worldwide box office.

Watch: Hugh Grant on The Undoing