Hugh Grant from rom-com to dark killer
When Hugh Grant accepted his Golden Globe in 1995 for “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” you could say he slayed the room — with the kind of boyishly befuddled, sweetly stammering speech he might have made to Andie MacDowell in that film or to Julia Roberts in “Notting Hill.”
Fast forward a few decades and Grant, now 60, is doing a different kind of slaying. He’s up for another Globe for HBO’s “The Undoing,” in which he actually kills — like, with a mallet — as an affluent Manhattan pediatric oncologist who sidelines as a psychopath.
It’s not his first cinematic exploration of evil: In “A Very English Scandal,” for which he also earned a Globe nod, Grant got some careerbest reviews as Jeremy Thorpe, the real-life British political leader who was tried on charges of conspiring to murder his former lover. And on a lighter (but still not very nice) note, he played a very theatrical villain in “Paddington 2.”
The metamorphosis has been unmistakable: As he’s grown older, Grant has grown darker, at least in terms of his roles. As he tells it, he’s “old and ugly” anyway — rom-com leads aren’t an option. But what unites those three recent roles, he says, is not so much evil as narcissism. “It’s almost,” he quipped, “like the film and television world has worked out who I really am.”
Grant spoke recently upon news of his sixth Globe nomination, this time for best actor in a limited series or TV movie.
He spoke from his London home where he’s busy perfecting the art of making paper snowflakes, via his kids and their remote learning.
Remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How are you feeling about this latest nomination?
A: Oh, it’s really nice. I was never really one of the people who gets nominations and things. I spent many years making romantic comedies that people quite liked but never got nominated. So it’s really lovely. It’s put a spring in my step, which is a rare thing for me — I’m a gloomy bastard.
Q: It’s been said you are now specializing in characters that are charming like your old ones, but have a seriously dark underbelly.
A: I don’t really think of it that way. I just think, “What’s the most interesting stuff that’s coming across the desk?” Because I’m old and ugly, I don’t get offered the charming romantic leading men, and I’m rather glad I don’t. But I do get offered some very interesting stuff.
Q: You seem to relish playing dark.
A: You know, actors love playing dark. Audiences love dark. People love dark. I’ve got a book on my desk called “Why We Love Serial Killers,” and its very fascinating. So yes, it’s a huge relief in fact to be expressing evil, whether it’s in a very comedic way like in “Paddington 2” or a very disguised way like in “The Undoing,” or in a very smarmy way like in “A Very English Scandal.” What’s weird is that the common denominator of them all is not so much evil, it’s narcissism.
Q: Do you ever worry that playing such unsavory characters will make you unlikeable?
A: No. I really don’t have that worry! The trick anyway is that if you’re playing someone evil, they have got to be FUN evil. They don’t have to be good, but they have to be enjoyable. Which really is part of the trick of acting. It’s important to be real but I think it’s also very important to be in some way entertaining. In the end, that’s what we’re making, entertainment. And that sometimes gets forgotten.
Q: Does being recognized this year feel different, given what’s going on in the world?
A: Well, I certainly wouldn’t complain about my lot. I’m very lucky. But anyone who has been doing home-schooling for the better part of a year deserves some little boost in morale. If you want me to make you a paper snowflake, I can make you a really beautiful one now. In fact I quite like making them. I have also been trying to work out what the equatorial zones of the world are with my 8-year-old. Meanwhile, they’re screaming at me.
The trick anyway is that if you’re playing someone evil, they have got to be FUN evil ... they have to be enjoyable.
Hugh Grant Actor
The great recession didn’t just eliminate jobs, it also erased an entire town. Six months after US Gypsum closed its doors in Empire, Nevada, a company town since 1948, its zip code was retired and its inhabitants forced to leave. It’s this brief history that opens Chloé Zhao’s extraordinary “Nomadland,” which follows one of those residents, Frances McDormand’s Fern, on a journey through the American West to nowhere in particular.
Fern is a vandweller, partially by choice and partially by circumstance — the shuttering of Empire, the costly and slow death of her husband and a deep-seated desire for solitude and exploration have left her with few connections and even fewer possessions, which she whittles down to the essentials and the most sentimental. Everything else is left in a storage unit off a desolate, snowy highway that looks like it is quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
We don’t hear much from Fern at the beginning, or ever really. An Amazon factory floor manager speaks more words than she does in the first few scenes. It’s one of the beauties of “Nomadland,” which is based on Jessica Bruder’s book about the invisible casualties of the modern economy. This is a quiet, somewhat romantic, but mostly realistic exploration of a fringe population of aging workers and recent retirees who are living out the rest of their days wandering, picking up odd jobs and paychecks as seasonal workers at National Parks, South Dakota’s Wall Drug and in massive Amazon warehouses through something called the CamperForce program.
McDormand disappears into Fern, which is no small accomplishment for an actor as recognizable as she is. She doesn’t have a show-stopping monologue railing against the system that’s left her with so little, or a tear-filled admission about why she has taken to the road. You pick up things here and there about her in normal conversation which helps propel her journey along to its quiet conclusion. But otherwise Fern is there to listen and to learn. She is a vehicle through which we meet the Vietnam vet with PTSD, the woman who watched her parents die of cancer and the corporate American exile who saw a friend deteriorate in a desk job with a retirement boat in his driveway that he never got to use. Many are authentic nomads too, like Linda May, a main character in Bruder’s book, and the vandwelling evangelist Bob Wells, a mini celebrity in his own right.
There is always a lingering tension that things might take a turn. But for this most part, this is a film full of kind souls.
Zhao is a spiritual descendent of another cinematic poet, Terrence Malick and there are a handful of shots that look straight out of “The New World.” But she goes beyond Malick in some ways. He keeps the interesting and real people on the fringes and the glamorous movie stars at the center of his films. She stays unapologetically on the fringe.
I’ll admit, I had a bit of anxiety over revisiting “Nomadland” after naming it my top film of 2020 just over two months ago. You never know what will happen on a second watch, whether your appreciation will grow or diminish, whether you’ll be as invigorated as the first time or, in a worst-case scenario, bored. It’s not the kind of film you’ll want to turn on every week, but two months was the perfect amount of distance to fall in love with “Nomadland” again.
Don’t let words like Oscars frontrunner and awards darling get in the way of your openness, either. This film is a small miracle and a uniquely meditative experience.