Heretic’s directors say this movie proved Hugh Grant could be a villain

This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground throughout the fest.

Heretic, the upcoming A24 horror film from A Quiet Place writers and Haunt and 65 directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, is far from the first film to cast Hugh Grant as a villain. Paddington 2, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre, and The Undoing are just some of his darker roles. But as Woods and Beck revealed in a Q&A after a surprise screening of Heretic at Fantastic Fest, none of these films gave them the idea to cast Grant as the villain in their movie.

Heretic stars Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and The Fabelmans’ Chloe East as Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, a pair of Mormon missionaries whose door-to-door evangelizing brings them into contact with Grant’s character, Mr. Reed, a charming man whose malign agenda for them takes the entire movie to fully unfurl.

As Beck put it, “When we had the script in hand, it was a huge question: Who can perform what ostensibly feels like a stage play? It has to be somebody that opens the door and you don’t immediately feel like there’s red flags shooting up all across the board. If so, then Paxton and Barnes don’t feel intelligent. And that’s the whole backbone of this movie, that they are incredibly intelligent, and smart in all their choices. We started trying to figure out during the casting process who nails that. And all of a sudden, we started thinking about seeing Cloud Atlas in 2012.”

“Every time we see a movie together, the credits roll and then we turn to each other, like, Oh, what’d you think?” Woods said. “And Cloud Atlas is an insane, ambitious, beautiful, crazy movie. And it’s like, what do you even say about Cloud Atlas when the credits roll? We were just kind of sitting in silence, stunned, like, What do we talk about? And Scott turns to me and he’s like, ‘Hugh Grant!’ And I was like, ‘I know!’ It’s so great to see somebody at that point in their career, challenging themselves and being clearly excited to do something crazy. And then he spent the next 10 years, in our minds, doing that, and becoming the world’s greatest character actor. So when we started thinking about him for this role, we just got so, so excited.”

Like most of the primary cast in Cloud Atlas, Grant plays a variety of roles in different periods and places across history, from 1849 New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii in 2321. Based on David Mitchell’s novel of the same name, and co-directed by Tom Tykwer and Lana and Lilly Wachowski, the film explores the idea that the same souls are reincarnated from age to age in different bodies. That gives the primary cast (including Grant, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Susan Sarandon, among others) the opportunity to play roles well outside their usual range.

In Grant’s case, that meant a departure from his familiar self-effacing leading-man roles, often in romantic comedies: In Cloud Atlas, his roles include a malevolent reverend, a malevolent CEO, a malevolent overseer, and a cannibal chieftain.

“I mean, it felt to us that from first seeing him in American cinema with Four Weddings and a Funeral, when that came over in ’94, this person is very charming and very accessible,” Beck said. “And he created this relationship with the audience — we were like, We love the idea of weaponizing that, and turning it on its head, and taking everything the audience loves about him and making a terrifying, beat by beat by beat. It’s something that we love — like when we saw Punch-Drunk Love in 2002, and saw Adam Sandler take what he’s familiar for, but totally upend it and find that relationship with the audience that makes it accessible, but then [he] does something totally unique with it. That was the aspiration of bringing Hugh on.”

Heretic debuts in U.S. theaters on Nov. 8.