Daily Times

Hugh Grant is issuing a correction to the internet about his marriage. The British actor made headlines in 2018 when he tied the knot for the first time at age 57. Now, he’s clearing up gossip about that union to Anna Eberstein, with whom he shares three children.

The Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually star, now 60, shared a screenshot, sent by a friend, with search results for “Hugh Grants wife” which notes in the first hit that he married the Swedish TV producer “for passport reasons.”

“No I didn’t, internet,” Grant wrote. “I married her because I love her.” The article in question leads back to an interview Grant gave USA Today a month after he was married. In it, he said he and Eberstein agree that “marriage is a pretty preposterous social construct” but it was “a nice thing to do” as parents of three children. Though he noted that it also made traveling smoother.

“I didn’t like going through immigration into countries where they’d say, ‘Everyone with a Grant passport, over here, and all the others through there,'” he told the outlet, noting Eberstein “went through with the nannies. That seemed all wrong.” When it was pointed out that swimmer Michael Phelps married to make travel easier ahead ahead of the Rio Olympics, Grant said, “Did he? Well, we’re very similar in many ways.”

Grant and Eberstein exchanged vows in a small ceremony in May 2018. Leading up to that, the movie star —whose exes including long-time love and still close friend Elizabeth Hurley — after developing a reputation for being marriage-averse. But he has since said that once he committed, he was happy he did. “Well, I was just plain wrong,” Grant said in 2019 of being against marriage. “And children, you know. I used to roll my eyes. People would say, ‘Oh Hugh you don’t understand it,’ but they were right.”