Hugh Grant Was Born to Play the Villain

This revievw was first published on September 10, 2024 out of the Toronto International Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to Heretic’s theatrical release.

“This is the freak-show period of my career,” Hugh Grant said to a question about why he’s turned in recent years toward playing villains. “I got old. I got ugly. No one offered me leading men anymore.” The occasion was a Q&A after a Toronto International Film Festival screening of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s new A24 horror film, Heretic, in which Grant plays Mr. Reed, an eerie man with a lot of thoughts about religion who may or may not be holding two Mormon sister missionaries hostage in his creepy old house. “I’m quite drawn to evil, violence, death,” he added. “I feel very happy 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 done some terrific work in recent years as either villains or at least characters of questionable moral standing — think Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, The Undoing, and Paddington II — his riveting turn in Heretic is something else entirely. In some ways, it’s a classic Hugh Grant role: We recognize all those familiar mannerisms and tics and gestures that once helped him charm his way to the A-list in hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. But now that the floppy hair is gone and the wrinkles have set in and the voice has become gravelly, the persona has been poisoned. By the time it’s all over, it’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling off this role, which feels like it’s in conversation with the actor’s earlier years. It’s enough to make one ask, Has Hugh Grant always been the villain?

A silly question, perhaps, but an intriguing one because of how disarming he was in all those earlier movies. Those were performances, to be sure — sometimes great ones — but Grant seemed to know exactly the right combination of gestures to win us over. All actors have to seduce us to some degree, but the ones playing villains who charm their victims to lure them in have to seduce us more than others. And the Hugh Grantisms are all still there in Heretic: the rapid blinking, denoting nervousness; the raised eyebrows suggesting intermittent helplessness; the sudden toothy smiles, attempts to break the tension. He grimaces at having to navigate awkward exchanges; he shrugs with boyish guilelessness; he does the combination head-tilt half-snarl when he has to say something maybe a teensy bit unpleasant.

The film basically features only three characters: Besides Reed, there’s Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), the two young missionaries who’ve called at his door in the middle of a storm because he’d earlier expressed some interest in learning more about Mormonism. He invites them in. They note that they can’t enter unless there’s another woman present. He says his wife will come right out and that she’s got a pie in the oven. Plus, his general affability helps draw these young women in, maybe like it once did in rom-coms and other, more pleasant films.

The two innocents enter, and soon Reed has them in the middle of a thorny debate about faith and why exactly they believe what they believe. Well, it’s more of a lecture: Reed, who quickly makes it clear that he’s studied a lot about religion and probably knows more about Mormonism than the two girls do, has a lot of ideas about faith. The film’s most bravura scene has nothing to do with suspense or scares (though Heretic has plenty of those), but rather features Reed expounding on the history of the world’s monotheistic religions, working in references to the history of the board game Monopoly and pop-song plagiarism along the way.

It’s a chatty part, Mr. Reed, and Grant observed in his Q&A that he works best when he has a lot of dialogue to handle. “I dread moments in films when I’m not speaking,” he said. “I get self-conscious.” That’s another thing about his turn in Heretic. Once the story really kicks in, Grant seems so at ease, almost as if an entire layer of phoniness has been removed. His rom-com performances were so relatable because of the constant self-doubt of his characters. Mr. Reed, for all his aw-shucks shrugs and hesitations, doesn’t turn out to have any self-doubt. What makes him so terrifying eventually is how comfortable he winds up being in his skin.

When Grant says the offers dried up, he’s not kidding. Even figures like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro have struggled in their later years to find lead roles worthy of their talents. (Before De Niro reconnected with Martin Scorsese, his career had almost become a punch line.) Grant had a double challenge, because the genre he was most associated with, the studio romantic comedy, pretty much died as a big-screen endeavor. He got old, and the kinds of movies he made got old. And the movies got old not just because they stopped being hits, but because audiences probably became a lot more cynical about love, or at least what those movies sold to us as love.

Grant’s turn in Heretic is not just a great role that commands attention, it’s also a part that requires a dash of that Hugh Grant charm to pull off. Yes, we know we’re in a horror movie, but we spend the first act of the film secretly hoping that Mr. Reed will turn out to be an okay guy, that his wife will indeed turn out to be in the next room with her blueberry pie, and that he really is curious to find out what these two smiling young women think of Mormonism — that Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes’s slowly gathering suspicions are just some kind of horrid, comical misunderstanding that will soon be cleared up. But the truth is that the world doesn’t make movies like Notting Hill or About a Boy anymore. It makes movies like Heretic.