Hugh Grant’s Recent Comments on Movies He has Worked In Make This Career Sound Real Tough: “This is the freak-show period of my career,” So why the shift towards villainous roles in grunge movies? “I got old. I got ugly. No one offered me leading men anymore.” It may appear to be laughable, but it’s a fact. The occasion was a Q&A after a Toronto International Film Festival screening of ‘Heretic’ a Horror film by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Hugh plays Mr. Reed in the movie, a character who’s imposing and has dark views on religion and, perhaps, is keeping two sister missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in his haunted house. He is married to Meryl Streep, a well-rounded, spoiled German woman. “I’m quite drawn to evil, violence, death,” he added, “I feel thrilled in that world.” Not long after that, someone from the audience wished him a happy birthday; Hugh Grant had just turned 64.
While Grant has portrayed amazing characters ranging from villains or at least morally ambiguous characters as seen in Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thief, The Undoing, and Paddington II his riveting turn in Heretic is something more of a different identity altogether. In a way, it is a quintessential Hugh Grant part: we remember all those irritating records of mannerisms, tics, and gestures that forged the British actor of American romantic comedies including Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. However, after losing the floppy hair, and wrinkles settling in along with gravelly voice to add to the spectacle, the portrayal has been quite damaged, to put it lightly. Once it’s finished, it’s hard to see how anyone other than Grant himself could have played this role, which probably arises from the essence of his older self. Now, this is an interesting thought: was Hugh Grant the villain all along?
An interesting question silly perhaps as well, but this is why because of how he was so disarming in all those earlier movies. Of course, those were performances at times quite great ones but great performances were somewhat hard to come by, but Grant seemed to know exactly the right combination of gestures to win us over.
Every actor has to attempt to seduce us, but the ones playing villains who use charm to manipulate their victims into submission, tend to have to seduce us more than others. Heretic contains some classic Hugh Grantisms: the rapid blinking typical of nervousness, the occasionally raised eyebrows that suggest helplessness, and the sudden flashing of smiles that seem physically pained and are intended to relieve tension. He shudders at the thought of humiliating himself in wrapping awkward conversations; he shrugs off with a boyish charm; he does the combination head tilt half snarl when he is called upon to utter something that is, well, not so pleasant.
The film quite literally has three protagonists: Apart from Reed, there is Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) who are two young assistant missionaries who knock on his door during a raging storm after learning that he wanted to know more about the Mormons. He invites them in. One of them said, “But we are told that we cannot go into the house unless there is another woman in the house”. He adds that his wife is due anytime as she was baking a pie in the farmhouse and, more importantly, he is generally friendly and sociable which amuses those young ladies, perhaps as it used to happen in rom-coms or other better films.
The two children walk in and shortly afterwards Reed has them embroiled in the thorny debate the two had avoided for most of their childhood which is faith and how exactly they came to believe what they do. That’s the only element that can be seen as qualified to be called a debate anyway because it is more of a lecture to… Reed, for example, does make it clear that he has done extensive reading on religion and in fact, he knows more about Mormonism than the two girls he is conversing with. It is built within The film’s most extraordinary Moment, of which there is no lack: the tension, the jumps, and the anatomical horrors, it just serves to be the background against which Brother Reed subjects his captive audience to an analytical history of the world’s known one god religions, along with side references to the history of Monopoly and the history of mediocrity in love songs.
It’s a conversational part, Mr. Reed said, and Grant noticed during the Q&A that the more dialogue he has to work with, the more effective he is as an actor. “I hate those bits in films where I’m not talking,” he said. “I become very self-conscious.” That’s another thing about his turn in Heretic. Once the story properly picks up, Grant appears to be more confident as if an entire layer of pretenses has been stripped away. The reason his performance in rom-coms is so engaging is because he perfectly nails the issues of self-loathing and low self-esteem that his characters constantly face. As far as Mr. Reed has delivered his shucks followed by a twist, I can see no trace of self-doubt on his face. What eventually becomes most disturbing about him is the extent to which he becomes comfortable in his skin.
As Grant puts it, offers start closing and believability disappears. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro have not been able to find a good leading role to fit their talents over the years. He reunited with Martin and De Niro’s career, before that point, became a punch line. Grant had a double whammy because the type of film he was most linked to which is the studio rom-com virtually collapsed as a type of film. He got old and the types of films he made got old. And films got old not only because they were not making money, but audiences became a lot more cynical about love, or whatever those films were trying to push for as love.
For Grant in the movie Heretic, his role is not only a compelling one that grabs attention, it also takes a bit of that Hugh Grant charm for one to effectively play it. Sure, we are not questioning the fact that this is a horror flick but I guess the first act of the movie was filled with unbearable anticipation hoping that Mr. Reed would not be such a terrible person, that his wife is a lady in another room having a blueberry pie, and that he genuinely wonders how these pretty young things could relate the religion of Mormonism with such sweet smiles — when Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes started to suspect something, it was only a horrible, funny miscommunication that could be turned around soon enough. The reality though is that times have changed there too no one wants to watch the exquisite Normington Hill or the riveting About a Boy, instead people favor Heretic.
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