British film star Hugh Grant jokes that the stop-motion animators behind his new movie "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" helped him be the actor he has always wanted to be.
"That's the joy of this film," the famously witty and self-deprecating Grant told reporters in New York recently. "Physical comedy, I can't really do that, but I didn't have to. I left it to the animators. They did everything for me. I can't do physical comedy. I can't do stunts. I can't do emotion. They did it all."
The voice cast for the Aardman Animations movie features Imelda Staunton, Martin Freeman, Salma Hayek, Jeremy Piven and David Tennant, but Grant said he didn't work with any of them when he was recording his lines in a studio.
"They have a brilliant all-purpose actor, who reads the other [parts]. Otherwise, it's just Peter Lord standing next to me being extremely critical and difficult," Grant deadpanned to United Press International while sitting next to Lord, the film's director, who laughed at the remark.
Asked what it was like not having the energy of those other actors to feed off of while taping his lines, Grant replied, "Well, this all-purpose actor was so brilliant, actually, if you wanted ping-pong, you got ping-pong.
