There's a Reason Hugh Grant Makes Such a Good Villain

Heretic, the twisty new A24 horror movie from writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, starts with a question: Why would two young female Mormon missionaries enter the house of a sketchy older man despite strict instructions never to do so unless there’s a woman present? And why would they stay when it’s clear to every person in the audience screaming for them to get out that he’s an unstable creep? The movie’s answer is simple: because he’s Hugh Grant.

Grant entered movies as an object of desire. In the Merchant Ivory production Maurice, based on a gay romance that E.M. Forster wrote in 1913 but kept secret until after his death in 1970, Grant is as beautiful as any man has ever been on screen, with dark, liquid eyes and a pale, delicate face that might have been sculpted by a Greek master. With a shock of wild, floppy hair, Grant was alluring and mysterious—he played Lord Byron the year after Maurice—but it wasn’t until Four Weddings and a Funeral that he discovered the secret to his future success: playing characters who don’t realize that they look like Hugh Grant. In Four Weddings and Notting Hill, to name just two of the string of now-classic romantic comedies that followed, women as gorgeous as Andie MacDowell and Julia Roberts practically throw themselves at his feet, but he’s so frazzled he hardly notices. Four Weddings makes a gag of his inability to be on time for any of its titular nuptials—including, eventually, his own—but even in movies where he’s not surrounded by alarm clocks, he exudes the energy of someone who’s always running late. If he had a signature phrase, it’d be “My goodness, is that the time?”

Grant’s gift for perpetual befuddlement made him a rom-com ideal, dazzling but approachable, tongue-tied but pure of heart. In Notting Hill, he overhears a group of men making crude remarks about the Hollywood movie star with whom he’s enjoying an improbable flirtation, and springs to her defense before realizing that he can only stammer awkwardly at the offenders. (He calls his persona from this time “Mr. Stuttery Blinky.”) But it also allows him to get away with some fairly egregious behavior, the kind we’d be less inclined to forgive if he weren’t such an endearing mess. In Four Weddings, he leaves his bride stranded at the altar, and in Love Actually, he reassigns a subordinate when he catches her kissing another man, but we forgive him, or at least we’re meant to, because there’s no malice involved, just the romantic fumblings of a man who’s always the last to know what he wants.

In Bridget Jones’ Diary, released two years after Notting Hill, Grant starts to let us see the sinister edge to that charm. His relentlessly cocky publishing executive starts up an affair with Renée Zellweger’s publicity assistant, and though the sex is great and he’s clear about his intentions to keep it casual, he neglects to mention that he’s engaged to another woman. He comes running back after his fiancée dumps him, pledging his love and allowing that he’s “a terrible disaster with a posh voice and a bad character,” a disarming admission that would have reduced audiences of Grant’s earlier movies to willing goo. But for Bridget Jones, it doesn’t stick. His character may, at last, be looking for love after a lifetime of tomcatting, but he’s not ready for it, and he’s not worth the trouble.

Although Grant wouldn’t step away from the rom-com for several more years—he’s made only one since 2009, although a new Bridget Jones is scheduled for next year—his willingness to play an unabashed cad showed him moving beyond the anxious but irresistible lead, giving us the first stirrings of what we might call his villain era. 2012’s Cloud Atlas, a centuries-spanning sci-fi epic in which Grant tapes back his eyelids to play the sexually abusive manager of a Korean diner, felt like a scorched-earth farewell to his likable era—he credits the movie with allowing him to “enjoy acting” again—but it wasn’t until 2017’s Paddington 2 that he settled on what to do next: play bad guys with gusto.

Phoenix Buchanan, the washed-up actor whose devious machinations land Paddington in prison, sees himself the way we used to see Hugh Grant: bursting with charisma, able to put anything past anyone with a jolly crinkle of his eyes. But Phoenix is long past his prime, which wasn’t that impressive to begin with—although his villain’s lair is stocked with mementos of past glories, the only evidence we see of him plying his craft is hawking pet food in a tattered dog costume. It’s a risky part in a sense, a star once renowned for his good looks sending up his own vanity—one modeled so closely on his portrayer that in early drafts, the film’s writers simply called the character “Hugh Grant”—but Grant dives in with no vanity of his own, treating his by-now familiar mannerisms as the worn-out shtick of an aging hack. And it’s a delight.

In the 2020 miniseries The Undoing, Grant stars opposite Nicole Kidman as half of a wealthy Manhattan couple, seeming like the perfect husband and father until a young woman he’s been having an affair with turns up dead. The series plays on his wife’s, and our, difficulty accepting that someone so harmless-seeming would viciously crush his mistress’ skull with a hammer, and it keeps us in a state of suspended disbelief until it confirms that he’s done just that. There’s something especially chilling in the way we’re forced to confront our own reluctance to accept a terrible truth about someone we think we know, who couldn’t possibly have done such a thing.

Once America’s sweetheart, Grant has become its heel. In Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, he’s the thief with no honor, a treacherous rogue who betrays his former comrades with a grin. In Wonka, he takes on the role of a jaundiced Oompa Loompa named Lofty, a sullen helper who scowls instead of whistling while he works. (He used the movie’s press tour to talk about how much he hated playing the role, but his dissatisfaction was so drily hilarious that it’s hard to tell if it was on the level or just an extension of the bit.) Both movies made hundreds of millions at the box office, proving that audiences love hating Grant as much as they once loved loving him.

Grant’s character in Heretic, Mr. Reed, relies on the same assumption. He greets the young women at his door, Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), as a dotty old man, assuring them that it’s safe to come in because his wife is just in the other room, baking a pie. By the time they realize there’s no wife (and no pie), they’re locked inside, but Mr. Reed continues to pour on the charm, even as he reveals they may never make it out alive. In a motley cardigan and orange-tinted glasses, his endearing flounce of hair now a greasy tangle, Mr. Reed has more self-confidence than he could ever possibly have earned—he’s a guy who only thinks he looks like Hugh Grant. And he’s got more physical threats in store for them, although the greatest torture he inflicts on his young captives is a lecture on the history of organized religion, delivered with the smug superiority of a self-proclaimed expert who’s just spent a few hours scrolling Reddit. Grant makes the spiel, which also encompasses a Radiohead song and the history of the board game Monopoly, both engrossing and repellent. And he punctuates his ramblings with a gesture that’s instantly familiar to anyone familiar with his peak rom-com era, a sort of apologetic, squinch-eyed smirk that seems to whisper, Can you blame me?

In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, Grant acted out iconic horror-movie lines as if they were romantic-comedy dialogue, adding a delighted grin to “Hello, Clarice” and cooing “The power of Christ compels you” as if it were a pickup line. But his performance in Heretic suggests there’s less daylight between the genres than one might assume. Like a bumbling rom-com lead, a horror-movie baddie often uses the appearance of vulnerability to get his prey to lower their guard. (Think Buffalo Bill wearing a fake cast.) Grant may claim he’s left rom-coms behind because he’s “too old and fat and ugly” for the genre, but he’s clearly relishing the opportunity to give his old audience a little shock. When an interviewer at Heretic’s premiere asked if it was hard to leave a role like Mr. Reed on the set, Grant quipped, “It’s still very much with me—I killed three people this afternoon.” And then he added, with a familiar wink, “I feel awful about that.”