Hugh Grant made a name for himself playing charming leading men in romantic comedies like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, but he insists that viewers are more likely to embrace villains.
“Audiences, for some reason, are always drawn to the baddie, which is fascinating,” he tells Vanity Fair. “It must mean that we are fundamentally evil as human beings. The antagonist, the bad guy, represents the real truth of the human experience.”
Grant has no problem channeling his own “deranged” state of mind while “regretfully” revisiting his career for VF’s Scene Selection video series. The 64-year-old actor can find something detestable in nearly every role he’s played—a trait that helped him secure at least one part. “I got a very unsettling letter with the script from [writer-director] Paul King saying, ‘Look, we’re making Paddington 2, and this time the bad guy in it is a washed-up old actor who’s incredibly vain and no one really likes him,’” Grant recalls. “‘We thought of you.’ And I got over that hump.”
He minces no words when it comes to his time as a romantic lead. “I look awfully tired,” Grant says upon watching his performance as the British prime minister in Love Actually. Although much of the ensemble Christmas classic is “utterly preposterous,” Grant’s wife Anna Eberstein has pointed out that the film is actually quite dark. “It’s all about pain,” Grant says, “and the best kind of British humor—dealing with pain.”
There’s plenty of suffering to be found in his performance as a floppy-haired travel bookshop owner in Notting Hill. “Whenever I’m flicking the channels at home after a few drinks and this comes up, I just think, Why doesn’t my character have any balls?” Grant says. “I think he’s despicable, really.”
As for sparring with his Bridget Jones Diary costar Colin Firth? “Colin’s very weak. He’s virtually a piece of shellfish,” the actor says, noting that it was far easier for the pair to fight each other in the 2001 original film than its 2004 sequel. “We both put our backs out,” Grant says of shooting The Edge of Reason, released more than 20 years before the upcoming Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. (There was another sequel, Bridget Jones’s Baby, in 2016.) “A chiropractor had to be summoned to the set.”
Grant’s characters in HBO’s The Undoing and A24’s Heretic, a horror film now in theaters, are different only in that they let their inner evil swim to the surface. As few but Grant could put it: “There’s always a sad jelly somewhere inside us. There’s some psychosis, some hurt, something. Behavior is the layers we wrap around us to protect that jelly.”