Actually love is a much darker affair for Hugh Grant’s latest exploits in Sky’s The Undoing
As Sky Atlantic’s new six-part thriller The Undoing prepares to air, Danielle de Wolfe chats with the show’s star Hugh Grant to find out more.
“I feel marginally less bad about being an actor now than I did in 2003 – that was a low point,” says Hugh Grant cautiously.
The 60 -year- old British actor is referring to a comment he made nearly 17 years ago in Paris, solemnly declaring he had made a mistake by taking up acting.
“I’ve almost enjoyed some of the acting I’ve done in the last six or seven years, which is ver y unlike me. It’s been ver y nice to break free of having to be, you know, leading man in love.”
The original comment came at a time when Grant starred as the fictional British Prime Minister in hit romantic comedy Love Actually, one of a string of film roles that saw him t ypecast as a romantic lead.
But with his latest onscreen project being an altogether darker affair, the Hollywood actor now seems set on veering away from the ver y roles he built his career upon.
“This one I couldn’t say no – I mean I’m always looking for a reason to say no to jobs but I couldn’t say no, the pedigree was too… it was too classy, the whole thing.”
His latest acting endeavour sees him star alongside on-screen wife Nicole Kidman, Donald Sutherland, Edgar R amirez and Matilda De Angelis, as par t Sky Atlantic’s dark new thriller The Undoing.
“I was all ready to be intimidated by Donald Sutherland, he’s a kind of icon, but he turns out to have a mental age of about six, he just likes jokes about bodily functions,” quips Grant.
A whodunnit of impressive propor tions, the script is written by David E Kelley, the talent behind HB O series Big Little Lies, and is based on the novel You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz.
Headed up by Night Manager director Susanne Bier, the meandering stor y line sees both Grant and Kidman’s characters grapple with grief, shock and confusion after a young mother is found dead following a private school fundraiser.
It’s a tale that distinctly echoes that of Big Little Lies, one that leads countless lives to unravel as a steady stream of revelations bubble to the surface.
“I suppose you could look at it in t wo ways,” says Grant of the meaning behind The Undoing’s title.
“One is they’ve done a life for themselves, these peo - ple, and it all gets undone. That’s perhaps the most obvious.
“But I also think it’s, for Grace, for Nicole’s character, it’s about can you undo what has happened, because she is, you could argue, still in love with me despite the fact I’ve betrayed her.”
Unveiling fur ther details of the plot could lead to the cliff-hanger unravelling in a matter of moments, a factor Grant finds enjoyable.
“It’s ver y difficult but certainly one of the appeals of the whole project, what might be lurking beneath,” he continues of his reasoning behind taking on the role.
“I think at some point I did read the novel, but I realised we diverge quite wildly from the novel after the ver y beginning, really. S o there’s not much correlation in this par ticular case.
“I think Harold Pinter had a phrase about The Weasel Under The Cocktail Cabinet and I suppose it’s that really. What appears to be a prett y perfect kind of existence for these people turns out to be fractured by ver y dark forces.”
Filling in the gaps through the eyes of Kidman’s character, Grace, a statuesque psychotherapist and mother of one, the audience find themselves questioning the charm of Grant’s character, Jonathan, a highly regarded children’s oncologist.
Left behind in the wake of a spreading and ver y public disaster and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.
It’s a distant cr y from Grant’s forlorn, lovestruck roles of the past; swapping romance for a dive into the human psyche that the actor claims to find rather enjoyable.
“I actually did tr y to put layers in all those romantic comedy characters, it was just harder,” he says.
“For some reason, evil or screwed-up people are easier to act and more fun to act and always more attractive to audiences.
“I really don’t know why exactly. I think possibly somewhere inside of us we know that we’re all evil and we respond to evil… where - as niceness is possibly just a veneer that we put on top of our evil natures to make us fit in and is sor t of, less attractive, less fascinating.”
The television project proved a change of pace for Grant, who says the filming schedule “was really long” compared to that of his usual feature films.
“I’m used to just doing films, which are 10 weeks maybe, this went on for six bloody months,” he declares.
“I remember enjoying the last day ver y much and I think I horrified people by giving ever yone cigars – including the boy who played my son, Noah. He loved his cigar – but I don’t think his mum liked it much.”
The Undoing is a series that traces a dark and intense trail of destruction – one you’d think might have some long-lasting effects on the cast, given the immersive nature of acting.
“It is prett y dark,” saysGrant. “There’s no therapist – except now, studios are obliged by their lawyers to put some kind of therapist on the set when you do sex scenes,” he says.
“Ever y time you’re about to – ” he pauses, searching for the right word.
“They’ve always been difficult anyway, sex scenes, they’re kind of awkward, but then in the middle of all this, as you’re taking your clothes off, some woman comes up and says, ‘Hi, I’m the counsellor for the sex scene; are you comfor table with what you’re going to do?’
“They’re all desperate not to get sued now, studios. But no, no therapy… we all became immensely depressed,” he adds with a smirk.
● The Undoing will be available weekly on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV from Monday October 26