🎧 Live From Toronto, Hugh Grant!
The 'Heretic' star and I have a spoiler-free chat about A24's elevated horror, getting into character and why he's increasingly 'drawn to nastiness'
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It’s not that Hugh Grant had never made a horror film — his 1988 film The Lair of the White Worm, he says wryly, is popular with the “heavy potheads” now. But after playing a singing and dancing bad guy in Paddington and a yuppie bad guy in The Undoing and a medieval bad guy in Dungeons and Dragons, he realized “it’s juicier to play the baddie than the goodie” — and what better baddies are there these days than in the kind of elevated horror films made by A24?
Which brought him to Heretic, the new thriller from directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods that premiered here at the Toronto International Film Festival. The day before that buzzy premiere, Grant joined me onstage for a spoiler-free conversation about what it takes to play a villain who’s more like a “hip college professor” than a monster — and the incredibly meticulous preparation he does to get there.
The Ankler teamed up with Toronto International Film Festival to present this live edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast for an audience that truly lived up to Toronto’s famously high standards.
To kick things off, I brought on my friend Joe Reid, a senior writer and awards correspondent at Vulture, to look at the festival thus far and especially the thrilling best actress race. Joe was fresh off seeing Mikey Madison in Anora, and I had caught the world premiere of Hard Truths, a small film with a colossal Marianne Jean-Baptiste performance at its center (which I wrote about here). We both agreed the best actress was looking far more crowded — and exciting — than it usually is by this point in the season.
Then Grant took the stage, kicking things off by talking about how he’d wanted to make not just a horror movie, but a horror movie for A24. “I’m drawn to nastiness,” he told me with just the slightest grin. “And I think a lot of quite interesting stuff is being done in that area at the moment, particularly by A24. I’m still getting over Midsommar. I watched it with my wife one evening. We’ve both been in counseling ever since.”
We were careful not to spoil Heretic, in which Grant plays a seemingly kindly man named Mr. Reed, inviting in two Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) on a stormy evening to have what seems like a broad, high-minded conversation about religion. But there was so much to get into all the same, from Grant’s extensive process to build the character before shooting begins to how he’s gotten used to tight close-ups, which Heretic uses to great effect.
“There’s a whole thing about, oh no, I must emote as an actor, I must emote,” Grant says. “And I think you must, but very often it’s so buried, your emotions, and there's layers and layers and layers of defense and mask over it. For me at least, masks are what it’s all about— and then just the occasional glimpse of the throbbing jelly deep inside.”
For the past decade, Grant has not only been taking on some of the most interesting film roles of his career, but he’s been deeply involved with Britain’s Hacked Off campaign, pushing back against press overreach and, as he tells me, building a close group of friends who have nothing to do with Hollywood. We talked about that campaign, what he sees as the next frontier in his work and how he plans to handle cell phones for his own young children. I told you there was a lot to cover in this conversation!
