Trivia Cafe
6

When Hugh Grant was caught in Los Angeles with a prostitute, it helped publicize his upcoming film with what title?

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entertainment

In the summer of 1995, Hugh Grant was a rising star in the U.S. to promote his first big Hollywood leading role, a romantic comedy co-starring Julianne Moore. Just two weeks before the film's premiere, Grant was arrested in Los Angeles for lewd conduct with a prostitute, Divine Brown. The incident created a massive media scandal that threatened to derail his career. The movie he was there to publicize was, ironically, a story about a commitment-phobic man grappling with impending fatherhood.

While many assumed the scandal would be a disaster for the film, it had the opposite effect. Grant famously went on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and offered a candid, self-deprecating apology that was widely seen as a masterful piece of crisis management. The intense media frenzy surrounding his arrest generated an enormous amount of buzz. As a result, the public was acutely aware of the actor and his upcoming project. When the film was released in July 1995, it became a box office hit, proving that in this case, all publicity was indeed good publicity.