NEED TO KNOW
Seth Meyers says he had to prove that he wasn’t Hugh Grant when a fan approached him at the 2026 Winter Olympics
The Late Night with Seth Meyers host revealed during his Monday, Feb. 23 episode that a fan had mistaken him for the British actor in Italy
“I kept having these moments where people come over and go, ‘Who are you?’ ” he recalled
Seth Meyers is used to getting approached by fans. But not as Hugh Grant.
During the Monday, Feb. 23 episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host revealed that he was mistaken for the British actor while attending the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy this month.
And he had to pull out all the stops to prove he was actually Seth Meyers.
“I sat in one of the regular seats. I’m a man of the people,” Meyers, 52, said. “I wasn’t up in one of those luxury boxes. One, because I like to interact with people and two, not invited… But it was very nice because I was walking around and Americans were stopping to say hello, Canadians were stopping to say hello, a lot of Scandinavians were stopping to say hello. A lot of people wanted pictures.”
While Italians “had no idea” who Meyers was, the late-night host admits they were “curious as to why other people knew who I was.”
“So I kept having these moments where people come over and go, ‘Who are you?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I host a television show.’ And then they’d go, ‘Alright, I’ll get a picture.’ And I’m like, ‘Don’t do me any favors,’ ” Meyers recalled.
Seth Meyers hosts ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers’ on Feb. 23, 2026
Lloyd Bishop/NBC via Getty
As Meyers explained, one man in particular mistook him for Grant, 65.
“Another guy goes, ‘Are you Hugh Grant?’ And I was like, ‘No,’ and then he thought… I had to show him a picture of me interviewing Hugh Grant,” Meyers said.
He added, “And you know what he said? He goes, ‘Ahh, I would have got a picture with Hugh Grant.’ Anyways, it was wonderful.”
Indeed, Meyers has interviewed the Golden Globe winner multiple times on Late Night, most recently in November 2024.
Meyers’s biggest lookalikes appeared on his show back in November, when he welcomed sons Ashe, 9, Axel, 7, and daughter Adelaide, 4, on Late Night. During a Q&A with his audience this month, Meyers — who shares his three kids with wife Alexi Ashe — explained that he was “so happy about the instinct not to tell them ahead of time so they had no time to be nervous or overthink it.”
“And it was really sudden. I literally was like, ‘Okay, you guys are gonna come out. I’m going to talk to you real quick,’ ” Meyers revealed.
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“And I didn’t know how they’d react in front of an audience. And even my oldest, who is the shyest, I’m like, ‘You guys are gonna come out.’ He’s like, ‘I don’t want to go out.’ And Axel was like, ‘Here we go!’ And then Ashe was like, ‘All right, all right, I’ll go,’ ” he added.
Ultimately, Meyers said he got to watch his kids be “authentically themselves.”
“I love that an audience did not shake them from who they were, which was a really special thing to see because I’m like, I don’t think I have that as a performer,” he said. “But it was really funny, when it was over, they were walking and my son, the oldest one who was nervous, he literally grabbed my hand and was like, ‘We should do this again soon.’ “
Late Night with Seth Meyers airs weekdays on NBC. Check local listings.
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