The seemingly droll, breezy star is actually sentimental about his family and utterly serious about his work, including his villainous turn in Heretic.
Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral established him as a quintessentially British romantic hero of winning charm and diffidence. But his recent run of strange and sometimes creepy characters plays so effectively against type that you begin to suspect you were mistaken about his type all along.
He would be the first to say that something darker and more complicated lurks beneath his easy surface.
“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,’” Grant said as he strolled through Central Park last month. He was comparing himself – or at least his powers of persuasion – to Mr Reed, the charismatically articulate villain he plays in Heretic, a religious-horror movie due in New Zealand theatres November 28. “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce – I might be guilty of that.”
At 64, Grant is enjoying what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career, playing an unlikely rogue’s gallery of suave miscreants (The Undoing, A Very English Scandal), seedy gangsters (The Gentlemen), power-hungry tricksters (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) and self-deluded thespians (Paddington 2 and Unfrosted), not to mention the bumptious little Oompa-Loompa in Wonka. That abashed, floppy-haired, benign early version of himself – that was never who he was anyway, he says.
“My mistake was that I suddenly got this massive success with Four Weddings and I thought, ah, well, if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too,” he said. “So I used to do interviews where I was Mr Stuttery Blinky, and it’s my fault that I was then shoved into a box marked ‘Mr Stuttery Blinky’. And people were, quite rightly, repelled by it in the end.”
Grant had just come from Toronto, where Heretic had its premiere. In New York it was a blazingly beautiful day, and he greeted the park like an old friend, passing some of his favourite landmarks: the Delacorte Clock, whose bronze animals were doing their delightful dance to music to mark the hour, and the statue of Balto, the heroic medicine-transporting Siberian husky posing imperiously on his rock not far from the children’s zoo.
“Have you noticed that we’re being drawn irresistibly to Balto?” Grant asked, patting the statue. “Hi, Balto!” He added: “I’ve had an experience with some huskies before.”
He mentioned one of his first roles, in a 1985 miniseries about Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition in 1911. “I played a rather pathetic scientist whose name, appropriately enough, was Cherry-Garrard,” Grant said. He was required to mush a team of huskies across the snow.
“I said, ‘Go forward’ in Inuit, but those bastard dogs turned 180 degrees around and dragged me away onto the ice,” he said. “They were just laughing at me.”
It might seem odd to cast Grant, with his British facility for telling droll anecdotes against himself, in a horror film. Among other things, he is terrified of them and recently walked out of one at a multiplex he had wandered into by mistake with his brother, a banker who lives in New York. (Don’t get him started on Midsommar.)
But Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed Heretic, said in a joint video interview that Grant’s ability to subvert expectation made him perfect for the part.
“This is an actor who is revolutionising what his career was known for – and revamping it and turning it against his audience,” Beck said.
The pair, whose writing credits include A Quiet Place, recalled seeing Grant in the 2012 movie Cloud Atlas, in which he plays six characters, all despicable.
“The first thing out of Scott’s mouth when we came out of the movie was, ‘Hugh Grant,’” Woods said. “We got so excited about the challenging, bold and weird choice of him being in that movie. And in the next 10 years, for our money he became the best character actor around to play edgy, dark characters.”
Grant, whose youthful handsomeness has given way to a distinguished rumpledness, was a recognisable figure in the park. While most pedestrians affected a cool New York distance even as they clocked his presence, there were a few shouts of “I love you, Hugh!” At one point a woman approached, babbling about her obsession with About a Boy (2002), in which Grant plays a roguish bachelor who embraces the responsibilities of human connection and succumbs to monogamy. (There are definitely parts of himself in that character, said Grant, who – after years of enthusiastic single-dom and high-profile girlfriends like Elizabeth Hurley and Jemima Khan – finally married six years ago.)
“I know that movie word for word,” the woman said. She gestured vaguely toward her husband, who was tending to their baby and looking like he dearly wished to be somewhere else. “I literally make him watch it about once a year.”
“You’re very nice,” Grant said. (“Poor man,” he added, after they’d gone.)
Grant grew up in what he called “genteel poverty” in London, where his father worked in the carpet business. He won a scholarship to Oxford, then fell by chance, at least in his telling, into acting. He has always exuded ambivalence about the job, wistfully mentioning his half-written novel and grumbling about whether he even likes the profession. “I realise it’s not a good look,” he said, laughing.
He doesn’t love the Hollywood machine. Though he is reliably hilarious in interviews (and delightfully raunchy on British TV), his ironic wit and curmudgeonly affectations can land him in trouble. After a stream of anodyne enthusiasm from his fellow Wonka actors in a news conference last year, Grant mixed it up by declaring that “I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more”. (Taken out of context, that sounds terrible. But that sort of humour is normal in Britain; just watch the Richard Curtis movies starring Grant: Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Love Actually.)
“One confusing thing about him is that you don’t know what he’s serious about,” said Chloe East, who plays one of two young Mormon missionaries in Heretic, which was filmed in Vancouver. “He’s very British. You would say, ‘How is your weekend?’ and he would say, ‘It was terrible; I hate Vancouver.’ And you wonder, did he really have a dreadful weekend, or is that just his way of communicating?”
Grant takes his work, at least, utterly seriously. To prepare for roles, he writes out elaborate backstories for his characters and peppers directors with questions and notes in long email exchanges.
“He would send us three pages of, like, ‘I was thinking about Richard Dawkins, and what does this line mean, and this is how I would interpret it,’” Woods said. “We loved working with an actor who cared so much.”
Among other actors, he has a reputation for rigour.
“That whole ‘I don’t like acting and I wish I could be an accountant’ thing – that’s nonsense,” said British actor Hugh Bonneville, aka Lord Grantham of Downton Abbey, who appeared with Grant in Notting Hill (1999) and again in Paddington 2 (2018). “He may feign disinterest in the profession and downplay his own abilities, but he’s a great talent who works bloody hard on set.”
Bonneville recalled Grant’s bravura turn in the Paddington 2 closing credits, a musical extravaganza that was shot on the first day of filming and features Grant dressed in a saucy outfit of bedazzled kick-flare pants. (He plays Phoenix Buchanan, a louche, self-regarding has-been actor in what is widely considered one of his finest roles.)
“It took a great deal of commitment – and it also established him as a wonderful song-and-dance man,” Bonneville said. Grant aficionados might recall the actor’s Wham!-esque fake music video in the 2007 rom-com Music and Lyrics and his little Oompa-Loompa dance in Wonka. In a particularly hair-raising moment in Heretic, he sings a snippet of Radiohead’s Creep.
His approach often includes ad-libs. The risque lines uttered by his character, Daniel Cleaver, as he seduces Bridget (Renée Zellweger) in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) – including his iconic “Hello, Mummy!” response to Bridget’s enormous underpants – were all Grant’s idea. (A fourth Bridget Jones film, in which Cleaver has moved on from “cruising around the Kings Road eyeing up young girls in short skirts,” as Grant put it, is to be released in February.)
There are definitely bits of Cleaver, the toxic but intoxicating boyfriend who drove everyone mad in their 20s, in Grant, too. Asked in a video interview which version was closer to reality – nice in-person Hugh or wicked on-screen Daniel – Zellweger laughed.
“Do we have to choose? Can’t we have them all?” she said. “There are so many Hughs, and your guess is as good as mine. Whichever one he wants to be.”
Another side of Grant comes from his persistent and, given the British media landscape, courageous campaigning role for Hacked Off, a group working to expose phone hacking and other illegal activities by the country’s tabloid newspapers.
In April, Grant, one of hundreds of public figures whose phones were hacked by the now-defunct News of the World, reluctantly settled a lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun. He had accused the company of hiring a private investigator to break into his house and bug him, among other things.
“I would love to see all the allegations that they deny tested in court,” he said on the social platform X. But under English law, if he won the case in court but was awarded damages that were “even a penny less than the settlement offer” put forward by the company, Grant would have had to pay both sides’ legal costs – upward of £10 million ($21.5m).
“I’m afraid I am shying at that fence,” he said, adding that he planned to donate his settlement money to the anti-hacking campaign.
Grant may seen relaxed on-screen, but “it takes great skill to make it look that easy,” Bonneville said. In fact, Grant said, he’s often terrified of freezing up on set or of his self-consciousness overcoming his spontaneity. When he met East on the first day of filming Heretic, he confessed to being filled with anxiety about some of the dialogue-heavy scenes.
“In my head I was like, ‘You’re Hugh Grant, you’ve worked on a million trillion movies, and if anyone should be nervous it should be me,’” East said.
The scenes were endlessly workshopped and rehearsed in myriad ways, with Grant thinking through every action and intonation and inserting new snippets of movement, dialogue and even some strange little noises to break up the big blocks of talk.
“It was really interesting watching him,” said Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets), who plays the other missionary. “This was a whole other level of preparation. He was so precise about finding little quirks to make his character feel just a little bit off.”
Forced to do publicity for their projects, many stars can seem utterly fascinated by the conversation during an interview (they are actors, after all), only to instantly glaze over if it turns to a topic other than themselves. Grant, by contrast, comes across as genuinely curious and engaged. Well-read, hyper-intelligent and amusingly snarky, he has a fine British ability to talk endlessly, and often not altogether seriously, about virtually anything.
We discussed, among other topics, religion and death and politics and physician-assisted suicide and September 11 and New York City and whether we believed in the afterlife (probably not, though he said he once saw a ghost floating around in a castle in Yorkshire). We were just moving to the subject of smartphones, which Grant believes to be “the devil’s tinderbox,” when he spotted a lithe, dark-haired runner on a distant path in the park.
“Is that my wife?” he asked.
It wasn’t, though the wife in question, Anna Elisabet Eberstein, had travelled with him to New York and is indeed an avid runner. The two met at a bar in 2010. Grant, nearing 50, was still in his incorrigible-bachelor phase and had been “drunk for about three years,” he said; Eberstein, who is Swedish but was living in London, was mourning the end of her first marriage.
Their wedding took place eight years later. “I can’t believe she likes me,” Grant said. “But it’s a very happy marriage.”
As he talked about his wife and children – they have three together and he has two others from an earlier relationship with actress Tinglan Hong – his tone softened and the irony fell away. “They have made me absurdly sentimental,” he said.
Teary, too.
Grant cried when he saw Finding Nemo. He cries when he watches The Sound of Music. (“Every time I hear him talk about The Sound of Music, I think that’s his Rosebud,” Beck said.) He cries while reading aloud children’s books, especially ones about animal parents and babies.
He mentioned a story about a middle-aged bachelor rabbit whose self-centred life gives way to “total chaos in his burrow” when some unruly ducklings move in. He finds that he loves them very much.
“Of course, that was the story of my life,” he said. “I was living on my road, playing golf, perfectly happy. And then my life was turned upside down.”
He paused.
“Have you heard of Stick Man?” he said, referring to the Julia Donaldson picture book.
“He’s a stick,” he explained. “He has to go off and do something, and terrible things happen to him – dogs pick him up and people want to put him in the fire. And he keeps saying, ‘I’m not a stick, I’m Stick Man, and I have to get back to my children.’”
“Anyway, he does get back to them, and they’re very pleased to see him.”
Grant looked a little sheepish, but he also looked utterly sincere. “That always makes me cry,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Sarah Lyall
Photographs by: Dana Scruggs
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES