Why Hugh Grant Went Horror For ‘Heretic’
The best movies show you sides of actors you didn’t expect to see. Hugh Grant’s new movie Heretic shows the former romantic comedy king playing against type as a deranged murderer. The directors of Heretic revealed that a cult classic science fiction film convinced them that Grant could star in a scary movie.
Hugh Grant got a role in ‘Heretic’ because of ‘Cloud Atlas’
When Grant first became famous in the United States, he was seen as a live-action version of Disney’s Prince Charming. For many women, he was a dreamboat, and he played romantic leads in movie after movie. He started playing against type around ten years ago, which has led to his new film, Heretic. For the first time in his career, Grant plays a horror movie villain.
Heretic was directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writers of A Quite Place. During a 2024 interview with GQ, Beck discussed why he was willing to let Grant play a villain. “The role for us was Cloud Atlas,” he said. “Because up to that point, we were primarily familiar with what the world was familiar with, his romantic comedy roles. But when we started thinking about Hugh for the role, it was in retrospect [that] we started thinking that he’s always had an edge.”
Hugh Grant is not afraid of scandals
Beck related Grant’s casting in the film to the time he had an affair with Divine Brown while he was dating Elizabeth Hurley — a tabloid scandal that happened around the time when Four Weddings and a Funeral came out. “You think about his situation coming to America with Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the quote-unquote scandal that happened at that time, that he’s not shy about at all; in fact, he talked about it at the Heretic premiere at AFI,” Beck said. “But like, [there’s this] contradiction — America’s sweetheart [who] came from overseas, and yet there’s this other side to him. You see this side also reflected in his intellect and his ability to challenge large organizations.”
So, did Grant’s role in Heretic work? On one level, it did. His performance is mesmerizing. He has so much perverse magnetism that it’s impossible to look away when he is on the screen. The film contains a lot of clunky pop-culture referencing dialog, but Grant makes it work alright because of his delivery.
‘Heretic’ is a mixed bag
And yet, that dialog is still cringe-worthy. Did we really need a movie that mentions Monopoly, Lana Del Rey, and Bob Ross in the same scene? The film’s antireligious diatribes aren’t particularly insightful and contain some historical misinformation. Heretic opts for a bold ending that is memorable but doesn’t exactly pay off.
At the very least, the movie is interesting. We’ve seen a lot of religious horror movies, most of which were centered on Christianity or the fictitious Hollywood brand of Satanism that has little connection to actual Satanist groups. Here, we saw a movie about the conflict between religion and secularism. Perhaps Heretic could be the first of a slew of new films that focus on this divide.
Heretic isn’t perfect, but it shows that Grant had a lot more range than people used to assume.
