Hugh Grant appears in a scene from Heretic.Kimberley French/The Associated Press
Hugh Grant is playing to type in Heretic, the new horror thriller written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, arriving Nov. 8. His Mr. Reed – a deceptively dusty Scottish academic in a cardigan and drugstore glasses, who lures and then traps two young women missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into a deadly existential debate – is the kind of character Grant has been relishing for the last dozen years: a man whose intelligence and charm have curdled into self-loathing for how easy it is to feign it, and disdain for anyone who falls for it.
“I was never very comfortable with sunshine, warmth,” Grant, 64, said about the romantic comedies that made him famous, during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “I respected very much Richard Curtis’s writing” in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually. “Particularly the fact that the comedy was all a way of coping with pain.
“But the characters I played in those films were him, and his extreme niceness,” Grant continues. “He’s virtually a saint. He’s about to get a special Oscar for being a saint, saving Africa.” (On Nov. 17, Curtis, the co-founder of Comic Relief UK and USA, will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his 40 years and US$2-billion worth of fundraising.) “That is not me at all. They were not characters I was particularly comfortable playing.”
Indeed, I interviewed Grant for Premiere magazine’s Oct., 2003 cover. His arrest for soliciting a prostitute in L.A. was behind him; Love Actually was about to come out, and though he made me laugh steadily, he was palpably itchy. He admitted that in any conversation, part of him was always thinking, “How can I get away?” And I remember, as I inserted a new tape into my analog recorder, the edge of panic in his voice: “But you’ve already flipped a tape, how much longer do we have?”
On this September day, Grant radiates a more sincere vibe. “Was I miserable when you interviewed me back then?” he asks with a small moue. “I’m happier now.” Married since 2018 to Anna Eberstein, a Swedish television producer, he has three children with her and two from a former relationship. He looks hale as hell in a sharp suit, his laugh lines become him and his hair remains splendid.
After playing a cannibal in Cloud Atlas (2012), Grant hasn’t done a romantic lead again, opting instead for characters caustic (Paddington 2, Wonka), clammy (A Very English Scandal), creepy (The Undoing). He’s aware that Heretic isn’t an easy sell – the horror is a Trojan horse, an excuse to dissect ideas about the manipulations of organized religion, what Reed calls “things you believe just because someone asked you to believe them.” So sell he does.
“Reed and I had an awful lot in common,” Grant says. “He’s able to bewitch a bit. But the girls” – the missionaries played by Chloe East (The Fabelmans) and Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets), both of whom, coincidentally, were raised LDS – “quite quickly realize he’s not what he seems. I’m sure that’s me. I remember my teachers saying, ‘Who is the real Hugh Grant? We think you might be a bit insincere.’ I’m using some of that psychosis.” His grin is a flashbulb, momentarily blinding.
Grant grew up in west London, the son of a carpet-salesman father and a schoolteacher mother; his older brother, James, is an investment banker in New York. As youngsters the Grants went to church, “but very quickly my brother and I said, ‘This is bollocks,’” Hugh recalls. “Then, rather touchingly, my father, who had been a churchgoer all his life, said, ‘You’re absolutely right, it is bollocks.’ And he stopped going.” (Grant’s mother died in 2001.)
Together, the family began reading Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. “Then my father started sending Dawkins to all my very religious aunts, who were horrified,” Grant says. “So we’ve been quite devout atheists for some time.”
This is Hugh Grant, however; he has to throw some mischief into our 15 minutes. (And some real estate. We conducted our 2003 interview in a Kensington, London flat he’d bought “after a boozy lunch,” and later sold without ever moving in. He still owns another flat there, which he rents, and a splendid home near Holland Park. He also owns homes in “a little medieval village” in France; and in Torekov, Sweden, a fishing village that’s become chichi.)
“But my views may be changing,” Grant muses. “As death approaches, I notice that on bad days, there’s something comforting about the church in my village in France. I think Saint Lawrence is going to help me. It’s completely illogical, but I may be giving up on rationality a bit. Rationality, too, is limiting.”
Before he dies, Grant says, he wants to write a screenplay of his own: “I have a lot of ideas. I think it would be my salvation. Funnily enough, the Bridget Jones thing I just did” – Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, due out Valentine’s Day 2025, in which he reprises his role as the devilish Daniel Cleaver – “I rewrote completely my bit of it, and I loved doing it. Though it puts a lot more pressure on the performance. You can’t blame the writer. And I’m really protective of the jokes.”
By contrast, Grant calls Heretic’s 30-day shoot last October “intense, shattering. In most films, you’re in different locations, there are party days with tons of extras, new costumes, new actors. This was the same three people going to the same bleak, almost deserted industrial estate outside Vancouver. We never saw the sun. And we didn’t have trailers, we had offices. Air conditioned, slightly dark offices.”
On breaks, he’d take “long, lonely walks in Stanley Park. My only friend was a seal. He’d pop his little bald head up and I’d wave. I miss him, actually. I might send him a postcard.”
He’s doing his best to still it, but a telltale dimple keeps jumping in his cheek. Irreverent Grant is back, and he’s holding forth: “I’m very interested in Stanley Park. I think there’s some strange energy there. I kept getting a weird, fuzzy head every time I walked in the same place, a promontory sticking out into the sea quite near some totem poles. I did! I used to despise people who believed in energies and all that. But my house in Sweden is also on a promontory, and I get a dizzy head there, too.”
I suggest it may be simple agoraphobia. Grant disagrees. “I think I’m very delicate and sensitive,” he says, flashing one final grin. “And fascinating.” No argument there.
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