The most terrifying aspect of Hugh Grant’s performance in Heretic is its initial, chilling familiarity—akin to the guy that everyone from Julia Roberts to Reneé Zellweger to Sandra Bullock has fallen in love with before millions of moviegoers. He’s curious, charming, inviting, if a bit hard to read. The two Mormon missionaries who’ve just knocked on his door do not know that beneath this appealing exterior rests something much more sinister—and that when they enter his home, they may not make it out alive.
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Grant faced a conundrum in taking on Heretic’s “brilliant fucked-up character.” He knew to play a villain in an arty A24 horror movie meant inhabiting the skin of a gleefully bad guy. He also knew he’d need to convince the audience as to how he gets away with whatever he’s up to. So the actor who’s spent the better part of a decade shrewdly shedding his beloved rom-com screen persona—honed most famously in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love, Actually—decided to resurrect just a dash of it. “You don’t want the audience to be sitting there saying, ‘These girls are morons, the guy is clearly a weirdo and a dick,’” he tells me. “I was under some pressure to use my powers of warmth and charm.”
Grant recounts this with that knowing, fairly iconic grin. We’re cramped into the private room of a Toronto hotel restaurant, and the actor admits he’s hungover following Heretic’s raucous late-night Sunday premiere. With good reason: The movie showcases his richest big-screen part in quite some time, and particularly displays his finesse with dense, extensive dialogue chunks. To prepare for the part, Grant read essays by Christopher Hitchens and books on serial killers, put together a mood board with figures ranging from Richard Dawkins to Jeffrey Dahmer, and developed a look that included double-denim and ‘80s eye-glasses. The resulting creation of Mr. Reed is slyly terrifying, an antagonist that only he could play.
Heretic slaps an exclamation point on Grant’s latest career chapter, filled with compelling villains whose motivations and methods are kept close to the chest. In most of these projects, Grant has not been the lead; receiving top billing here feels fitting, then, since Heretic’s directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods first thought of Grant as a potential collaborator when they saw Cloud Atlas. The Wachowskis’ unhinged sci-fi epic cast Grant in six different roles, and the star credits the film with saving his career once the leading-man schtick soured, following 2009’s bomb Did You Hear About the Morgans?
“I was completely marooned,” Grant remembers of that period. “The Wachowskis offered me just a few small little parts in Cloud Atlas, and to be honest, I was probably only offered that because some of their international distributors had said, ‘We need some more recognizable names. Cram someone recognizable in here.’ They would’ve thought, ‘Oh, we don’t really want Hugh Grant, but we’ll give him some tiny parts.’ They will deny that but I think it’s partly what happened.”
Grant signed on with the condition that he add one more part to his list of duties—portraying Ben Whishaw’s husband, in what would turn out to not be their last onscreen romantic entanglement (see: A Very English Scandal). He came away from the movie renewed.
“I thought, Oh yeah, I used to really enjoy doing characters—in fact, I almost used to enjoy acting,” he says with a chuckle. “I started out doing silly voices, odd people, making people laugh at university, and then doing this comedy show in London. It was doing characters. Then through sheer chance, maybe because of the way I looked, I got drawn into the leading romantic hero. It went fine, but it’s not what I think I’m best at—partly because it’s less fun.”
In the 2010s, the offers coming Grant’s way “completely changed.” He wonders whether he’s played a good guy over the last eight years. Unfrosted’s Tony the Tiger or Wonka’s Oompa Loompa might come closest, because from his slithery Emmy-nominated turns in prestige hits A Very English Scandal and The Undoing to his arch villainy in Paddington 2 and The Gentlemen, there’s not much else on the table to consider. One reason why: He happens to be very good at being bad, Heretic an excellent example. It’s a delight to despise him more and more, scene by scene.
“On a big screen, over 90 minutes, unless there’s a sense of the quivering jelly—the damaged bit inside—it’s going to be boring and just be a mustache-twirling baddie,” Grant says. “You’ve got to get to the jelly.”
When Grant got famous in the mid ‘90s, he thought he needed to keep the swoony heartthrob thing going, even if cameras weren’t rolling. “The irony of the Richard Curtis parts I played is that they were actually character roles for me—I’m not that stutter-y, blink-ey guy. The catastrophic mistake I made was that because Four Weddings was such a gigantic success, I thought, Oh, well, this is the way of infinite wealth and success. People are eating up that person.’ So I did him in real life: I started doing interviews like him. In my Golden Globe acceptance speech from 1995, I said, ‘I love you, gosh, blah blah. Thank you so much’—what a dick. I’m playing the character because I thought everyone was eating him up. It was never me at all.”
Everyone, it turns out, was not eating it up: “People quite rightly were repelled by it in the end.”
Grant credits the hunky womanizing boss of 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Daniel Cleaver, with breaking him out of that type—both in and out of the movies. Acting opposite Zellweger and Colin Firth, the smash rom-com introduced a new variation of Grant’s star wattage. “There are people in my life who have always said, ‘Oh, that’s much more like the real Hugh,’” Grant says. He was asked to reprise the prickly role in the 2004 sequel, The Edge of Reason, which he did, and again in the next sequel, 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, which he declined. “I really couldn’t fit my character in—he just didn’t belong, so I stepped aside,” Grant says.
Cleaver is back, however, for the fourth film in the series, Mad About the Boy, which shot over the summer and is set for a Valentine’s Day release. (So no, he did not die in that plane crash.) Adapted from the Helen Fielding novel of the same name, this script did not initially satisfy Grant, either—at least in terms of his specific part in it. “I loved the script—it made me cry, and I wanted to help with this one,” he tells me. “But really there’s no part for Daniel Cleaver in it at all. They wanted him in it, and in the end, they’d done something I wasn’t crazy about.”
Grant took matters into his own hands after expressing his dissatisfaction. “I wrote some scenes,” he reveals, which the filmmakers liked enough to infuse into the story. He officially joined the cast from there. Grant isn’t always the most jovial interviewee, but he sounds genuinely chuffed by his involvement in this one. “It’s absolutely the best [Bridget Jones book], and I think the movie is very funny and very, very moving,” he says. “I’m not in a lot, I did a week’s work, that’s it…. But when you see the film, you’ll be very moved.”
That’s all quite a negotiation for a week’s work, but this is how Grant operates. Whether it’s Bridget Jones or Heretic, he prepares exhaustively. He doesn’t sign onto something without considering it thoroughly, and is not afraid to walk away. In general, since he’s working more in indies and television, he’s now especially skeptical of big-budget studio fare.
“I’ve turned down a few that I thought were insufficient in quality or independence allowed to the filmmakers—you felt like a big corporation breathing down the neck of these filmmakers, and I don’t want to make that decision,” he says. How could he tell? “I asked them bluntly. I quizzed the directors. You can tell quite early on, since you might have a few ideas about the part before you’ve signed up—you suggest things, and you can tell if there’s a lot of pushback from non-creative executives.”
In turn, maybe Grant has found his happy medium. You could point to Heretic, bringing back the façade of his old movie-star self for something darker and weirder. You could point to the new Bridget Jones, the way he figured out his way back into that world. Hell, if you’re Grant, you could point to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, one of his proudest studio jobs to date. “It’s such a good film,” he says. But with that comes some sharp, well-reasoned opinions—in this case, on its mediocre box-office intake.
“It’s the biggest mystery to me—why didn’t anyone do market research before?” he says. “I think that’s what went wrong: Basically, people just thought, I don’t want to see a film about this game. Why had no one asked the public?”
This is Hugh Grant we’re talking about, of course. If there’s one thing we can expect from him, it’s that he’ll ask the hard questions.
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