Hugh Grant, 65, Takes 5-Day Breaks From Tech to Feel ‘Properly Alive’

Hugh Grant says his solution to digital overload is simple: Disappear from it.

“Now I take these total holidays from all tech, all tech, for three, four, five days at a time,” Grant, 65, said in an April 14 video posted on YouTube by the advocacy group Close Screens Open Minds. “It is literally the only time I feel I’m properly alive.”

Grant said even a powered-down device bothers him if it’s nearby. “The presence, even if it’s switched off, of a telephone or iPad or something in the room — it makes me twitchy,” he said. “But when it’s not with you — you’ve gone somewhere, there is no phone, you can’t fix the problem, you can’t Google where you are, you can’t look at maps — [it] is bliss.” He wants the same experience for his five children. “I want them to know what it’s like to be a human being,” he said.

Grant, most famous for films such as 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and 2003’s Love Actually, is a patron of Close Screens Open Minds, which challenges the growing use of digital technology in schools. At a Close Screens Open Minds webinar in 2025, he compared the tech industry to “a drug cartel pushing its wares at children” and said watching kids struggle to disengage from screens has been “very, very depressing,” per Today.

His comments come as adults 50-plus are more digitally connected than ever. Smartphone ownership among Americans 50 and older climbed from 55 percent in 2016 to 90 percent in 2025, according to AARP research, and adults in that age group use an average of 14 digital services and 10 apps in three months.

Many say digital connection can feel like too much. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 47 percent of adults ages 50 to 64 said they spend too much time on their smartphones, along with 30 percent of those 65 and older.

Research suggests there are benefits to stepping back. A 2025 study published in the journal PNAS Nexus found that adults who blocked internet access on their smartphones for two weeks reported better mental health, greater well-being and sharper attention. Overall, 90.7 percent of participants improved on at least one measure of mental health, well-being or attention. The benefits were partly explained by shifts in how participants spent their time, including more in-person socializing, exercise and time in nature, along with less media consumption, greater social connectedness, more self-control and a bit more sleep.

Grant’s standard of having no devices nearby is more demanding than anything the study required, but he swears by it. It’s why he unapologetically calls himself, in that same video: an “angry, ranting parent” who believes that “it’s important that people do things together.”

Think you’re not on your phone that much? Take our quiz to see whether your screen habits may be more distracting than you realize.