Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Hugh Grant says he had COVID-19 earlier this year.
The 60-year-old actor discussed his experience with COVID-19 and the alarm he felt while ill with the virus during Tuesday's episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Grant said he and his wife, Anna Eberstein, came down with COVID-19 in the winter. Grant said he subsequently got a COVID-19 antibody test that showed antibodies in his system.
On the Late Show, Grant described his COVID-19 symptoms, which included excessive sweating, pressure in his chest and a loss of smell.
"I think I got it in sort of February," the star said. "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. My eyeballs felt about three sizes too big, and this feeling as if an enormous man was sitting on my chest."
"I thought, 'I don't know what this is.' Then I was walking down the street one day and I thought, 'I can't smell a damn thing.' You start to panic, because by then, people had just started to talk about this as a symptom," he added.
Grant said he attempted smelling flowers, garbage and his wife's perfume, to no avail.
"You get more and more desperate," he said of his loss of smell. "You want to sniff stranger's armpits, because you can't smell anything."
Grant has spent the COVID-19 lockdown at home with Eberstein and their children. The actor has three children with Eberstein and two kids with his ex-partner Tinglan Hong.
"I'm quarantined with three, a boy and two small girls," he said. "I've been locked up, the first time for three and a half months, with a four year old and a two year old girl. It's been all about Barbies."
Grant stars in The Undoing, an HBO adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel You Should Have Known. The series co-stars Nicole Kidman and airs Sundays on HBO.
