Hugh Grant isn’t playing a bad guy – he’s playing himself

Both on screen and off, the once-charming leading man is approaching his latest role – spectacularly grumpy villain – with gusto

This Halloween sees the release of Heretic, a critically acclaimed horror film revolving around two young Mormon missionaries who find themselves in over their heads when they try to proselytise Mr Reed, a man whose apparently homely persona is swiftly revealed to be a dangerous façade.
The directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods – best known for writing the sleeper horror hit A Quiet Place – knew that in order to make the film land, they had to cast Reed extremely carefully, so that he could seem both likeable and, when the time comes, deeply frightening. Who could be better than the much-loved Hugh Grant to play a character who is, by the actor’s own estimation, “brilliantly complicated and f______ up.”
Grant’s performance has drawn enormous acclaim from preview screenings, with many critics suggesting that it may even be the finest that he has ever given. Although horror films are a notoriously tough sell at awards ceremonies, Grant (who, somehow unbelievably, has never been nominated for an Oscar) stands a decent chance of recognition this year. All for managing to use, in his words, “my powers of warmth and charm” to create one of the most memorable big-screen villains in years.
While Heretic may well be a hit, Grant’s first out-and-out horror picture since Ken Russell’s absurd 1988 The Lair of the White Worm – if we discount Did You Hear About The Morgans?, that is – sees the actor not so much playing against type as wholeheartedly embracing the darkness and grimness that he is apparently drawn to, both on-screen and off-screen.
A few months before the film started shooting last year, Grant attended the Oscars and immediately became notorious for his rudeness to the TV presenter Ashley Graham. His eye-rolling weariness at her enthusiasm peaked when, asked which designer’s outfit he was wearing that evening, he tersely replied: “My suit.” No wonder that many media outlets, who have always had a strained relationship with the press-hating actor, rushed to criticise him. “Is Hugh Grant rude or just British?” read one headline in the Washington Post.
The now-64-year-old Grant’s career can be seen in three distinctive stages. The first, which lasted until the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994, saw him as a good-looking and talented actor, whose floppy-haired charisma could be channelled by filmmakers such as Russell, Roman Polanski and Merchant-Ivory into a range of intriguing character roles. Yet when Four Weddings made him a megastar, he quickly found himself stuck playing the same role both on and off-screen – that of the stuttering, bumbling fop, who somehow manages to snag the girl.
He may have varied his repertoire with the dastardly cad Daniel Cleaver in the first two Bridget Jones films – and wouldn’t he have made a fine Rupert Campbell-Black? – but he was compelled to reprise his socially awkward Englishman persona in increasingly poor romantic comedies throughout the Noughties, even while he told any journalist who would listen how much he hated acting and how desperate he was to give it up.
Two unlikely things revitalised him. The first was a new off-screen role as a champion for privacy; he has obtained significant damages for his telephone being hacked and has established himself as a firm critic of press intrusion, with his involvement with the Hacked Off pressure group. And the second was a series of small, mostly villainous cameos in the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, including an unlikely role as a cannibal. As he said to Vanity Fair earlier this year: “I was completely marooned…[but] I thought, Oh yeah, I used to really enjoy doing characters – in fact, I almost used to enjoy acting.”
It led to a golden third act in his mature career, in which Grant has specialised largely in nefarious roles that have included everything from the real-life (a heartbreakingly nasty Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal) to the fantastical (his splendidly roguish con artist in last year’s Dungeons and Dragons picture).
It is impossible to forget his scene-stealing role in Paddington 2, in which he plays the washed-up ham actor Phoenix Buchanan, and Grant himself has acknowledged that playing baddies represents the most entertaining challenge that he now faces: “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 moustache-twirling baddie. You’ve got to get to the jelly.”
He has certainly provided the jelly, and much else besides. But the suspicion remains that Grant is not himself an especially warm and cuddly character, and that his misanthropy is only growing stronger as he gets older and more interesting/craggy as an actor. He is unafraid to be undiplomatic. Although he praises Dungeons and Dragons as one of his best films, he has been candid about its lack of commercial success, asking “It’s the biggest mystery to me – why didn’t anyone do market research before? 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?”
Nor is his off-screen behaviour out the top drawer, either. “I lost my temper with a woman in my eyeline on day one,” he admitted in an interview about Dungeons. “I assumed she was some executive from the studio who should have known better. Then it turns out that she’s an extremely nice local woman who was the chaperone of the young girl. Terrible. A lot of grovelling.” Most actors would either not relate an anecdote against themselves of that nature, or would not behave in such a fashion in the first place. But that’s Hugh Grant for you – a man who has given up caring what people think of him.
Unsurprisingly, Grant is a publicist’s nightmare. He has suggested that he only joined the new Bridget Jones film after he was allowed to write his own scenes after, in the original screenplay, the writers “had done something I wasn’t crazy about.” His appearance in last year’s musical hit Wonka as an Oompa Loompa named Lofty may have been a typically amusing piece of drollery.
But Grant, who had to undertake motion capture to play the undersized figure, described the experience as “a crown of thorns” and said “I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.” When asked whether it had been worth it, he replied: “Not really”. For good measure, he revealed that he hated special effects pictures, “because you can’t tell what’s going on.” It is unlikely that we shall be seeing Hugh Grant as a guest villain in the next Marvel film.
The list goes on. Jerry Seinfeld, who directed Grant as a disaffected Shakespearean actor forced to play a cartoon tiger in the Netflix comedy Unfrosted, said of him – apparently in jest, but who knows – “We had lots of fights. He’s a pain in the ass to work with. He’s horrible. He tells you before you work with him, ‘You’re gonna hate this.’ And he’s so right.” The two only bonded after getting drunk together, and Seinfeld conceded that “he’s so cool and he’s that English thing, you know, that witty. He looks good in a jacket.”
The actor may have compared himself to a scrotum while presenting an award at last year’s Oscar ceremony, but he still retains the devilish charisma that he first displayed over 40 years ago in his 1982 debut, Privileged. Few could have imagined how prophetic that film’s title has proved to be for him.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Grant revealed: “At school, I had a teacher who used to take me aside and say, ‘Who is the real Hugh Grant? Because I think the one we’re seeing might be insincere.’” We may never know who the ‘real’ Hugh Grant is, any more than he may know himself. He has entered what he calls the “freak-show era” of his career, full of big, outsized characters and typically committed performances, and he is delighted to have placed a stake through the heart of the figure he calls ‘Mr Stuttery Blinky’ once and for all.
Although the actor, who has five children by two women – the relationships briefly overlapped – professes himself to be enormously sentimental in his private life and easily moved by the likes of Finding Nemo and The Sound of Music, on-screen he has become an engagingly horrible presence. He’s the exemplar of the devilishly attractive man we love to hate.
Heretic may have nudged his fascinating late-period career in a new and even more horrific direction, but underneath it all, the lurking suspicion will be who the ‘real’ Hugh Grant is. He may well be a good deal closer to the diabolical Mr Reed than audiences might like.