Hugh Grant Describes His COVID-19 Fight In The Most Vivid Way

An early wave of COVID-19 infected actor Hugh Grant, but the imagery he uses to describe his symptoms could keep the illness fresh on anyone’s mind. (See the full interview below.)

The star of HBO’s “The Undoing” said this week he and his wife got the virus in February and a recent antibodies test confirmed he had recovered from the disease.

“It started as just a very strange syndrome where I kept breaking into a terrible sweat. It was like a poncho of sweat, embarrassing really,” Grant told Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” Tuesday. “Then my eyeballs felt about three sizes too big and this feeling as though some enormous man was sitting on my chest.”

Grant, who’s played bumbling charmers in films like “Notting Hill” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” certainly has a way of describing a potentially lethal disease.

He lost his sense of smell and said he graduated from sniffing flowers to sniffing garbage just to see if he could pick up the scent. He joked that he wanted to whiff strangers’ armpits in case nothing else worked.

“I eventually went home and sprayed my wife’s Chanel No. 5 directly into my face,” he said. “Couldn’t smell a thing, but I did go blind.”

Grant is holed up at a hotel in London, where another lockdown is in place to curb the rapid spread of the coronavirus . The U.K. has recorded more than 1.2 million cases and 50,000 deaths.