Kevin Hart was “delightful and flattered” when Gugu Mbatha-Raw painted his portrait and gave it to him as a wrap gift at the end of filming Lift.
The Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle star and Belle actress bonded over their love of art while making the heist thriller in Belfast, Northern Ireland. To commemorate the end of the shoot, Mbatha-Raw presented Hart with a portrait she had painted of him.
“I think he was delighted and flattered,” The Morning Show actress told Marie Claire, noting that the painting now hangs pride of place in his home office.
The British star explained that she and Hart were like “chalk and cheese” but they found common ground with art when their Lift director F. Gary Gray took them to an exhibition as part of their preparation for the heist comedy.
As an art collector, the comedian turned to self-confessed “art nerd” Mbatha-Raw for her insights.
“About things he was looking to acquire; he would ask my opinion,” she shared.
The Loki star told W Magazine in 2022 that she was gifted an easel and a set of paints from Will Smith on the set of 2015’s Concussion, but she barely touched them until the pandemic in 2020. She began by painting portraits of her friends before moving on to famous figures and co-stars.
She revealed at the time that she painted Hart when she took time off from shooting Lift due to Covid.
“I had to have time off because I got Covid for the first time, two years in,” she shared. “Kevin’s got such an exuberant spirit, I ended up painting him and having the background exploding in a Pop Art kind of way. If you’re looking for any silver lining to the isolation – if I hadn’t been forced to stop in my normal rhythm of life, maybe I wouldn’t have come back to it.”