AceShowbiz -

Hugh Grant is officially no longer attached to "Bridget Jones 3". The actor who plays Daniel Cleaver in the first two films reveals his withdrawal from the long-delayed project, two years after he said the third movie was put on hold due to script issue.

"I decided not to do it," he said in a new interview with Free Radio. "But I think they're going to go ahead and do it without Daniel. The book's excellent, by the way, but the script is completely different - well, the script as I last saw it a few years ago."

The first film "Bridget Jones' Diary" was released in 2001. The sequel "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" arrived in 2004. Both starred Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Grant. The threequel has been in development hell for several years now. It is expected to be based on Helen Fielding's third book, "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy".

Grant's newest movie is romcom "The Rewrite". He will next star in Guy Ritchie's "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.". He said he was taking a break from acting. "I'm not out there looking for films," he told Yahoo!. "On the whole, I'm out of show business."

"It's miserable," he explained. "It's a very cruel world, no-one should go into it. I'm always getting cousins and friends, and daughters and sons of friends...wanting to talk about going into acting and I always say just don't do it at all. It's brutal."

Of his last flick "Cloud Atlas", he said, "I thought it was amazing. [The Wachowskis] are the bravest film-makers in the world, and I think it's an amazing film...it's frustrating to me. Every time I've done something outside the genre of light comedy, the film fails to find an audience at the box office. And, sadly, 'Cloud Atlas' never really found the audience it deserved."