Hugh Grant has admitted that he ended up becoming more like his character in Four Weddings and A Funeral, which was a “catastrophic mistake”.
The actor cultivated a reputation for playing rom-com leads when his career first began in the mid-’90s, which saw him take on starring roles in Richard Curtis’ iconic films Four Weddings and A Funeral, Notting Hill and Love, Actually.
However, Grant believes that the success he had in those roles made him think he could keep up his success if he assimilated aspects of his characters into his actual off-screen personality.
“The irony of the Richard Curtis parts I played is that they were actually character roles for me—I’m not that stutter-y, blink-ey guy,” he told Vanity Fair. “The catastrophic mistake I made was that because Four Weddings was such a gigantic success, I thought, ‘Oh, well, this is the way of infinite wealth and success. People are eating up that person.’ So I did him in real life: I started doing interviews like him.
“In my Golden Globe acceptance speech from 1995, I said, ‘I love you, gosh, blah blah. Thank you so much’—what a dick. I’m playing the character because I thought everyone was eating him up. It was never me at all.”
More recently, Grant has stepped into very different roles, typically villainous ones. Indeed, his latest project is the A24 horror film Heretic, where he plays Mr. Reed, a seemingly harmless man who answers the door to two young Mormon missionaries, played by Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets, The Boogeyman) and Chloe East (The Fabelmans, True Blood). It is his first horror role in over 30 years.
His experience in rom-coms did have some use, however. “You don’t want the audience to be sitting there saying, ‘These girls are morons, the guy is clearly a weirdo and a dick,’” he tells me. “I was under some pressure to use my powers of warmth and charm.”
Back in February, Grant channelled his Wonka character Oompa Loompa at the BAFTAs as he presented the award for Best Director while singing the ‘Oompa Loompa’ song.