Hugh Grant Revealed He Was Diagnosed With COVID-19

During a virtual visit with Stephen Colbert on A Late Show, Hugh Grant confirmed that he and his wife Anna Elisabet Eberstein suffered through COVID-19 last winter. Though neither Grant nor Eberstein were tested whilst they were sick, an antibody test taken in October confirmed both had it, and still carry the antibodies.

"I had it, my wife and I had it way back in the winter," Grant confirmed, stating that they first got sick in February before the nationwide shutdown. "We have antibodies, so we're not going to get it, I don't think."

Grant described his symptoms in a very Dr. Seuss-like way. "It started as just a very strange syndrome where I kept breaking into a terrible sweat, like a poncho of sweat, embarrassing really," he said. "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.'"

It wasn't until he lost his sense of smell that he realized he was probably infected with the coronavirus. "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 told Colbert.

Grant continued, "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."

The actor is currently quarantining in London, which has entered into its second lockdown since the pandemic began. He's been spending his time playing with his daughters' Barbies—"making them fall in love...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."

Having gone through the worst of it, Grant being in the midst of a Barbie affair is child's' play—literally.