Jerry Seinfeld Says Hugh Grant Was ‘Pain In The Ass’ on Set of His New Film

However, in Grant’s defense, Seinfeld did say he was warned about the actor’s behavior by Grant himself.

While sitting down with Graham Bensinger to reflect on his time directing his first film — Netflix’s Unfrosted — Seinfeld revealed how he assembled his all star cast.

“It was fun it was crazy, but the people that I had around me, people like Melissa McCarthy and Jim Gaffigan and Amy Schumer are so funny … I just asked them [to be in the film], except for Hugh Grant,” he said. “He called me and he said, ‘I would like to be Tony the Tiger,’ I went, ‘You’re Tony the Tiger’, he said ‘Do I have to do an American accent?’ I said, ‘No, do whatever you want!'”

Seinfeld has admitted to being a long time fan of Grant, comparing him to someone like Sean Connery and describing him as charming and debonair. “I just wanted to meet him, I love the guy,” Seinfeld told Bensinger.

However, it wasn’t always calm on set between the new friends.

When asked whether directing was harder than he expected, Seinfeld, at first, said “not with the amazing people that I had.”

“I mean Hugh Grant was a total pain in the ass, which he told me he would be, we had so many fun fights,” Seinfeld added with a smile. “I would say to him, ‘You’re English. You don’t know anything about comedy, you know about wit, English people are witty, there’s no money in witty, we do comedy we get big laughs in this country!’ And he would scream ‘I know a lot about comedy’, he was the best, he was my favorite.”

There was some real onset arguments, however, with Seinfeld’s most notable being within the props department.

“Some guy on the movie, he just lost it he started screaming at one of his assistants, I mean screaming like crazy loud,” he recalled. “And I go, ‘Everyone stop, this is a Pop Tart movie, none of this matters, we will not have any screaming, this is not important.'”

“I made a big deal out of the fact that this is not important, we’re here to just make a silly movie,” he concluded.

Unfrosted is a film around sworn cereal rivals, Kellogg’s and Post, and the invention of Pop-Tarts, something Seinfeld has been thinking about for a long time.

The comedian and actor has been stewing on the rectangular snack for a while. In 2018, he tweeted that he’d been thinking about “an invention of the [Pop-Tart] movie.”

Unfrosted pops out on Netflix on May 3.