Hugh Grant takes his villain era to the next level in “Heretic”: There's 'more juice in an evil character'

"You'd be hard pushed to find an actor or actress who says, 'I just like playing nice people.' They're tough and they're always borderline boring," the actor tells EW.

Hugh Grant's days as a conventional heartthrob are over. He doesn't miss them.

"Let's face it, no one wants me to play the romantic lead anymore," he tells Entertainment Weekly, "and thank God they don't."

This fall, the Notting Hill star headlines Heretic (in theaters Nov. 15), the latest horror-thriller from directing duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, best known for penning A Quiet Place and directing 65. The film is something of an anomaly in both the horror landscape and Grant's filmography: It's a verbose, claustrophobic thrill ride that hinges on lengthy conversations about faith and religious institutions, and it's Grant's first foray into the genre since Ken Russell's 1988 film The Lair of the White Worm. "I think it is brave because religion is a slightly no-go area, perhaps especially in the United States," the actor says of his new project. "In that way, I think it's edgy. I'm proud of that."

In his introductory scene, Mr. Reed (Grant) magnanimously opens his front door for Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) — two young missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who seek to convert him to the Mormon faith. Reed offers the duo freshly-baked blueberry pie and welcomes a lively conversation about their faith. His warm friendliness and cheeky self-deprecation suggest a character who plays perfectly to Grant's usual strengths as a leading man.

Unfortunately for Barnes and Paxton (and fortunately for viewers), Reed's hospitality only goes so far, and the girls' stay devolves into a marathon of theological mansplaining and chaotic violence as Grant's character slowly reveals his true intentions — and, with them, his unpredictable dark side. "Villains have usually got a facade, and this is a very good example of that facade being important to how the story is told," he says. "It would've been obviously all wrong if, from the moment I'd answered the door to Sophie and Chloe, I'd been demonstrably psychotic and evil. A slow reveal is the key. And in this case, really as slow as possible."

Related: Hugh Grant bedevils in Heretic, a theological debate wrapped in horror trappings

Though Heretic provides Grant his meatiest villain role to date, anyone who's followed the last decade of his career will see the horror film as a natural progression of a trend rather than a left-field surprise. After spending his early career as one of Hollywood's go-to leading men for romantic comedies and period dramas, Grant came to specialize in nasty, antagonistic supporting characters in projects including Paddington 2, The Undoing, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Wonka, and Unfrosted.

Grant relishes his pivot to villainy. "Every actor really prefers it," he says of playing baddies. "I think you'd be hard pushed to find an actor or actress who says, 'I just like playing nice people.' They're tough and they're always borderline boring. They're very difficult, nice people or heroes. And there always seems to be more juice in an evil character. It's a fascinating discussion about why that is and why audiences, from the beginning of time, have always latched onto the villains sometimes when they don't really latch onto the good guy. So it's always tempting for an actor."

Beck and Woods first took note of Grant's capacity for darkness in Cloud Atlas, the sprawling sci-fi epic from the Wachowski sisters and Tom Tykwer, which saw the actor play multiple villainous characters and is the clearest single hinge point in his career. "It's such a big, sprawling, beautiful, insane movie, and we're sitting stunned as the credits are rolling, and the first thing Scott says is, 'Hugh Grant!'" Woods recalls. "It felt like that was the moment where he turned his career on its head and became the greatest character actor for the next 10 years."

"He seemed like he just gave himself over to the roles that interest him and not the roles that an audience expects of him, and that to us is always exciting," Beck adds. "Hugh was at the tip of our tongue very early in the process. There was something about knowing him as this very amiable, humorous gentleman, and yet there felt like there was more underneath that surface. And then we started seeing the crack in that veneer where he was playing these darker roles and starting to access something that we weren't familiar with. And it felt like the cinema world at large was not familiar with, but chomping at the bit to get to know more about that side of Hugh Grant."

Related: Hugh Grant and Paul King address the one bad review that tainted Paddington 2's perfect score

With Heretic, the filmmakers were thrilled to embrace the audience's existing relationship with Grant's screen persona and upend it for maximal dramatic effect. "It felt immediately like this could weaponize 35 years of what the world knows of Hugh Grant, and that was incredibly exciting to us," Beck says. The directing duo was inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson's subversion of Adam Sandler's usual image in 2002's Punch-Drunk Love. "We thought, 'How can we ever get a piece of that?' Where you take somebody out of context, and all of a sudden, all your familiarities are reconfigured in an exciting way, where you can't imagine what they're going to do next," Beck recalls.

Once Grant came aboard, the directors were flabbergasted by the actor's high level of commitment. "As soon as we started working, we were the benefactors of seeing a meticulous process," Beck says. "He is an engineer of character and artistry where he will investigate every sentence, every word of a script. If he has a question about anything granular, we will have a discussion about that. And the homework that he puts himself up to — the task is beyond anything that we've ever seen in any other collaborator."

Grant describes his work on Heretic as, more or less, another day at the office — though he concedes that his approach might surprise his colleagues. "It was the usual process for me now, which is incredibly detailed and thorough, possibly to the point of insanity," he says. "I start months and months and months before filming, and I go through the script with the finest-toothed comb, over and over again, asking myself questions: 'Why does he say that? Why does he do that?'"

Grant's detailed inquiries help him gain a complete understanding of the character. "Very often, the answers to those questions lead off into areas of his past," he says. "I jot those down and I create a vast kind of backstory and biography for the character. I talk about it with the writers, the directors, so that nothing is ever said or done just because it's written. I kind of know why he's doing it." Grant's process also sometimes inspires changes to dialogue and blocking in subsequent takes: "Very often ideas for things to say or do come up, and I jot those in the margin. And if I've got a collaborative director, I use 'em — perhaps not in every scene, but in a lot of cases, after having played the scene as it's written, I very often do it with my additions."

While shaping Mr. Reed, the actor says he drew inspiration from conniving figures he's encountered in real life, though he won't disclose specifics. "There have been people in my life who were useful to me, people who were very, very clever — brilliant, really, and in some ways very plausible and quite charming and quite bewitching, but who you gradually realize that there's something deeply wrong with them," he explains. "And these people very often really struggle to have any relationships in life, any meaningful friendships, and resort to things like pranks and slightly unfunny jokes and model-making and stuff like that."

Related: Hugh Grant asked Emma Thompson if Love Actually is their 'most psychotic' film after first watch

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Although religious films can sometimes inspire controversy, Grant remains unfazed by potential backlash. "What I've learned in the last five or 10 years is that no film, even if it's Paddington 2 or Willy Wonka, comes without a little burst of controversy," he says. "That's how the world wags. Now someone's going to get outraged, and then it's going to be a bit of a storm on social media. And I think I may be largely immune to it now. The storms blow through."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.