Grant was aware of the potential problem early. In a 2018 interview with GQ, he recalled thinking: “I don’t really want to be that same character again; I’ll get crucified!” He didn’t (Love Actually was a big hit, though its reputation has soured in the years since), but from that point onward his rom-com heroes would become more confident and less self-effacing.
Between Notting Hill and Love Actually, Grant had already mixed it up a little in About A Boy, and another Curtis-written production, Bridget Jones’s Diary. Whereas his characters in the other movies are charmingly shy, Will Freeman and Daniel Cleaver are anything but; the former inventing a child to make himself attractive to single moms, and the latter chronically, outrageously unfaithful. A caddish wolfishness overpowers both men’s charms. “All the way through those fluffy films—Four Weddings, Notting Hill—it had amused Richard [Curtis] and his gang… that people thought I was that nice fluffy character. Because they knew that I wasn’t, I was much closer to, for instance, Daniel Cleaver,” Grant said in that GQ interview. These characters would surely have rolled their eyes at Mr. Stuttery Blinky, just as the man who played him does today.
The first half of Grant’s romantic comedy era was dominated by his work with Richard Curtis, and his second with American writer-director Marc Lawrence. The first two of these Lawrence collaborations, Two Weeks Notice and Music And Lyrics, are among Grant’s best rom-coms. He shares a warm, wry rapport with his screen partners (Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore), and Lawrence is wise enough to dedicate most of the runtime to basking in this chemistry. As the obscenely wealthy (yet somehow still loveable) lawyer in Two Weeks Notice, and the washed-up ’80s pop star in Music And Lyrics, Hugh Grant was textually out-of-touch, and starting to look noticeably more rumpled than the boyish figure of the ’90s, yet the twinkle is still very much in his eyes. By the time of Grant and Lawrence’s third collaboration, 2009’s Did You Hear About The Morgans?, that twinkle had been extinguished.
The Rebellion
In 1996, Hugh Grant took what would be his last real career swing for the next 16 years, in the medical thriller Extreme Measures. He plays a British doctor working at a hospital in New York City, who becomes obsessed with the strange symptoms of a man who dies on his table. Following the clues toward the ruin of his career and the risk of his life, he uncovers a plot that involves a fellow doctor (Gene Hackman) experimenting on the city’s vast unhoused population.
Grant is fantastic in Extreme Measures. He doesn’t have any trouble getting to the end of a sentence the way he does in most of his British rom-coms; from his early operating room scene forward, he’s competent and authoritative. Still, he’s more of an everyman than a straight-up action hero. His terror has a tangible weight. The Brit-in-America schtick that would often be mined for comedy in his rom-coms adds another layer to his terrifying isolation, underlining how far from home, and from safety, he is. It all makes for a fascinating adjustment to his persona.
Critics were mixed on the movie—at best it approaches ’70s conspiracy thriller greatness, at worst it seems like silly ’90s pulp—but most agreed that this new look for Grant suited him. Audiences weren’t so keen, and the film only made back around half of its budget. Back to the rom-com mines he went.
After long years in those mines, and even weathering three years of Hollywood exile after Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Hugh Grant returned. Not for a rom-com, but for Cloud Atlas, the sci-fi epic from the Wachowski sisters which saw the starry cast take on a host of different characters each—the film that Grant has often cited as reigniting his fondness for acting. He played a cannibal chief, a 19th-century reverend, and an evil oil executive, amongst several other parts. Grant’s Cloud Atlas return signified a new era, where he has embraced ambiguity and complexity; thorny smaller roles, as opposed to romantic larger ones.
After one last dance with Marc Lawrence in The Rewrite (worse than Did You Hear About The Morgans?), Grant went on to portray villains in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, A Very English Scandal, and The Undoing. Which is not to say that Grant has moved from only playing rom-com heroes to only playing bad guys; he made a dashing head of the spy organization in The Man From U.N.C.L.E, and a supportive partner to Meryl Streep’s tone-deaf singer in Florence Foster Jenkins. In this glorious grab-bag of roles, Grant was at last able to recapture the career variety he’d had before Four Weddings stuck him in amber.
Though Grant has developed a well-earned reputation for grouchiness, he’s never taken himself too seriously onscreen—whether trying to sound like a mafioso (but actually more like an Irish Arnold Schwarzenegger) or starring in an ’80s pop video, his willingness to make a fool of himself enlivens his worst movies and helps turn his best into classics.
“It genuinely may be the best film I’ve been in,” Hugh Grant said about the much-beloved Paddington 2. In that film, he’s the nefarious, washed-up thespian Phoenix Buchanan. Playing a has-been actor whose ego dwarves his talent—when writer-director Paul King sent the script to Grant, he cheekily added a note saying the part was written for him—Grant is gleefully egoless, leaning into silliness at every opportunity, as the canine star of a dog food commercial, and most notably in a delightful end-credits song-and-dance routine.
But the film to truly cement Grant as a capital-A actor once again was Paddington 2’s diametric opposite: Heretic. Grant plays an apparently friendly stranger, Mr. Reed, who invites into his house two young Mormon women (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) who have come to his door to proselytize, so they can discuss theological matters further over some blueberry pie. They do have many discussions, but there is no pie—instead, a terrifying dungeon and mortal danger.
Heretic boasts such a satisfying central performance from Hugh Grant because we get to almost literally see him take off the mask he wore for so much of the ’90s and ’00s. In the first part of the movie, he could be any of his earlier characters. He’s warm, charming, trustworthy. There’s both kindness and a faint air of apology in his eyes. Until there isn’t. After a decade slowly breaking out of the mold he’d been trapped within for 20 years, there’s a real joy to Grant’s performance in Heretic; a talented actor reclaiming his long-lost love of the craft, and reveling in the loosened-up abilities he thought had calcified. While the movie itself is pretty grim, the delight in Grant’s lead turn makes it almost uplifting viewing.
Although he’s reviving one of his iconic rom-com era roles this month in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, things are different for Grant since the last time he played the roguish Daniel Cleaver. No longer beholden to the genre the way he once was, Grant’s roles feel like active choices rather than wearisome obligations. He’s never been so fun to watch.
