Hugh Grant is permanently grumpy, but you can always tell when he likes the project he’s promoting. When he recently promoted Wonka, he looked and acted like he was about to curl up and die, he was so miserable. Currently, he’s promoting his role in Heretic, an A24 horror film where he plays the bad guy. He’s really proud of it, you can tell. He was exceptionally chatty with Vanity Fair, as he spoke about Heretic and what happened over the course of his multi-decade career. Some highlights:
He had to play his Heretic villain as charming: He’s playing a “brilliant f–ked-up character.” But he decided to resurrect just a dash of his rom-com leading man persona. “You don’t want the audience to be sitting there saying, ‘These girls are morons, the guy is clearly a weirdo and a dick.’ I was under some pressure to use my powers of warmth and charm.”
The Wachowskis’ ‘Cloud Atlas’ changed his career after the 2009 bomb ‘Did You Hear About the Morgans?’: “I was completely marooned. 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.’…” He came out of ‘Cloud Atlas’ renewed. “I thought, Oh yeah, I used to really enjoy doing characters—in fact, I almost used to enjoy acting. 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.”
Playing swoony heartthrobs in the ‘90s: “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.”
Playing Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones’s Diary: “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. “I loved the script—it made me cry, and I wanted to help with this one. 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. [So] I wrote some scenes… It’s absolutely the best [Bridget Jones book], and I think the movie is very funny and very, very moving. 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.”
He’s 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.”
It’s cool that he points to Cloud Atlas as the film which renewed his interest in character-acting. He’s had such a strange career, and the “leading man” part of his career probably should have ended a lot sooner than it did. He is a great character actor, and I would even call him an underrated talent. It’s also kind of sweet that he still has so much affection for the Bridget Jones franchise and he really gives a sh-t about those characters. I would love to know what he turns down too.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.