Heretic actor Hugh Grant is enjoying the ‘freak show era’ of his career

NEW YORK – 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 in September.

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. “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce – I might be guilty of that.”

Opening in Singapore cinemas on Dec 12, the film revolves around two young missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) who are forced to prove their faith when they knock on the wrong door and are greeted by Mr Reed and become ensnared in his deadly game of cat-and-mouse.

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, 2020; A Very English Scandal, 2018), seedy gangsters (The Gentlemen, 2019), power-hungry tricksters (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, 2023) and self-deluded thespians (Paddington 2, 2017; Unfrosted, 2024), not to mention the bumptious little Oompa-Loompa in Wonka (2023).

That abashed, floppy-haired, benign early version of himself – that was never who he was anyway, he said.

“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.”

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.

But American film-making duo 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 and turning it against his audience,” Beck said.

The pair, whose writing credits include A Quiet Place (2018), recalled seeing Grant in the 2012 science-fiction epic 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 may seem relaxed on screen, but he is often terrified of freezing up on set or of his self-consciousness overcoming his spontaneity. When he met East (The Fabelmans, 2022) 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,’” said the 23-year-old American actress.

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 Thatcher (Yellowjackets, 2021 to present), 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.”

Outside of work, Grant has become a typical family man.

He and his wife, Ms Anna Elisabet Eberstein, met at a bar in 2010. The star, nearing 50, was still in his incorrigible bachelor phase and had been “drunk for about three years”, he said. Ms 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,” he said. “But it’s a very happy marriage.”

As he talked about his wife and children – they have three together aged 12, nine and six; and he has two others aged 13 and 12 from an earlier relationship with China-born 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 (2003). He cries when he watches The Sound Of Music (1965). He cries while reading aloud children’s books, especially ones about animal parents and babies.

“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. NYTIMES