Ten years ago, if you’d asked anyone to sum up the constituent parts of a Hugh Grant movie, their answer might have gone something like this. Grant plays a charming posho with a knack for transforming even the most straightforward piece of dialogue into a bumbling collage of “erm”s and “aah”s. He exclaims “bugger!” a lot, often while bumping into various beautiful women. The floppiness of his fringe is inversely proportional to his level of caddishness (if his hair’s longer, he’s nice; if it’s shorter, run). And if Richard Curtis isn’t in the director’s seat, then his name is quite probably lurking somewhere in the credits.
For a very long time, thanks to films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, Grant was synonymous with a particular sub-genre of romantic hero: one who lived in a nice part of west London and was good at swearing Britishly. Now, though, that has all changed. By his own admission, the 64-year-old is in the “freak show period” of his career. The man who was one of the most pigeonholed actors of the Nineties and Noughties has carved out a new niche, gleefully leaning into playing characters that are “twisted, ugly, weird [and] misshapen” (again, his words). Hugh 2.0 has earned some of the best reviews of his career so far. But as celebrated as this second act has been, it does make you wonder: has Grant simply swapped one form of typecasting for another, replacing the romcom stammerer with the unhinged oddball? Is he about to get trapped in another, stranger box?
Take his new film Heretic. It’s an unsettling slow-burn horror from cult-favourite production house A24. Grant plays Mr Reed, a bespectacled, cardigan-wearing type who is visited by two naive Mormon missionaries, who have turned up because he has expressed an interest in learning more about the Church of the Latter Day Saints. He invites them in to discuss the finer points of their beliefs (and to sample some of the blueberry pie that his wife is cooking). But the atmosphere soon sours. Reed’s affable chatter gives way to strangely insistent theological questioning; his eyes become more maniacal behind the Deirdre Barlow specs. The lights go out. The front door won’t unlock. That blueberry smell? Just a scented candle. It’s one of Grant’s most dynamic performances to date, one that has earned him raves from critics: Empire praised him as “genuinely chilling”, while The Telegraph called him “a wicked delight”.
Mr Reed would be a real curveball of a part if Grant had, say, jumped straight into edgy horror after delivering his speech about David Beckham’s right foot in Love Actually. But it is merely the latest in a string of roles that have allowed him to channel his inner bad guy, and riff upon the tics of his earlier performances in increasingly unsettling ways. The “Hughnaissance” (is it really an actorly comeback if the press don’t stick “naissance” on the end of your name?) kicked off in 2017, somewhat surprisingly with Paddington 2, when he put in an unforgettable turn as washed-up, narcissistic actor and bear nemesis Phoenix Buchanan (a role that involved him disguising himself as “an unusually attractive nun”). It continued when Grant lent an air of sly menace to the role of disgraced Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe in the BBC miniseries A Very English Scandal. Then he starred as Nicole Kidman’s creepy husband in 2020 drama The Undoing, a man whose veneer of charm shatters in slow motion over the course of the series, to horrifying effect.
This trio of roles challenged our notion of what Grant could do. Soon it became de rigueur for filmmakers to cast him as their movie’s resident oddity. He was a cartoonishly evil villain in the Dungeons & Dragons movie, and a grumpy, tangerine-hued Oompa Loompa in Wonka, dancing under duress. This phase is a little harder to sum up than the first half of his career, but at a push, it’s about weirdos, freaks and ruthless b*****ds.
There was always an undercurrent of villainy in his acting DNA
What’s arguably most interesting about this latest career phase is how it plays upon our preconceptions, and remoulds the signatures of Grant’s past performances. There was always an undercurrent of villainy in his acting DNA: you only have to watch him as the sleazy Daniel Cleaver in the Bridget Jones movies or as the shallow man-child of About a Boy to know that. He has simply dialled that up, while also twisting his old performance hallmarks – the stammers, the blinks, the self-deprecating faces – into something sinister. It works so well precisely because we’re so aware of his past filmography. As The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey put it in her review of Heretic, the “genius” of his performance “is that, really, he’s the same Hugh Grant as before. He still rushes headfirst into his sentences, only to end them with a sheepish smile… In short, he’s irresistibly charismatic”. It’s charm weaponised to disturbing effect.
Grant seems far more at ease embracing this darker side than he ever did as Curtis’s leading man. He recently told The New York Times that it was a “mistake” to ever lean into his Four Weddings persona (an alter ego he perfectly sums up as “Mr Stuttery Blinky”) on-screen and off. He’s also spoken at length about the “relief” of having aged out of the romantic hero category, and how it has allowed him to push himself as an actor.
An actor playing against their onscreen persona is a classic Hollywood reinvention trick, one that audiences lap up (you only need to look at Daniel Craig in his post-Bond era for a textbook example). But it’s a ploy that performers can only pull off so many times before this just becomes a new “type” to trap them. To keep pushing himself, and to maintain this brilliant momentum, Grant now arguably needs to dial down the freakiness and shift gear. Otherwise, he is running the risk of building up (then getting stuck in) another stereotype of what a “Hugh Grant film” is.
Next up will be a real throwback, when Grant reprises his role as Cleaver in the fourth Bridget Jones movie, Mad About the Boy (yes, the filmmakers appear to have resurrected him after killing him off in film number three, a wild creative choice that I wholeheartedly respect). I’m crossing my fingers that making peace with his romcom past in this way will lay the groundwork for him to move into another, even more varied chapter of his career. Period pieces, political thrillers, police procedurals: there are so many possibilities. Grant has always been a much better actor than his industry has known what to do with – as much as he seems to be enjoying his weirdo era, it’d be a mistake to pigeonhole him again.