How Paddington 2 turned Hugh Grant into a chilling movie villain

Do you remember when Hugh Grant was a cuddly romcom guy? For decades, that was the British star's regular style — bumbling ever-so-politely around while being foppish and dashing. But a few years ago, something happened. Suddenly, the bumbling romantic lead decided to break bad and become a genuinely loathsome villain. He's currently leading one of the most talked-about horror movies of the year. And it all started with a bear.

In 2017, Paddington 2 arrived in cinemas and promptly cemented itself as arguably the greatest sequel ever made. Part of the success of the film was Grant, who played the conceited and manipulative actor Phoenix Buchanan. Phoenix is the movie's primary antagonist, framing Paddington as a thief in order to steal a pop-up book that will lead him to a hidden fortune.

It's the best performance of Grant's career, allowing him to break bad in deliciously camp fashion while also sending up his own Hollywood persona to gleeful effect. By not taking himself at all seriously, Grant has found a whole new arena of potential roles which allow him to do something different — using his own reputation for ultra-posh insecurity as a way to be genuinely terrifying.

Of course, Phoenix isn't necessarily terrifying. He certainly gets under your skin, though, with that painted-on grin and his determination to put himself back on top of the industry pyramid. The fact he's willing to condemn Paddington to death in a runaway train carriage shows quite clearly that he's capable of doing whatever it takes to achieve his ends. The fact he's also a dab hand with a musical number doesn't erase any of that evil.

Read more: Hugh Grant on going dark for 'The Gentlemen' and if 'Paddington 2' villain will return (Yahoo Entertainment UK)

After Paddington, Grant seemed to catch the villain bug. Just a few months after Phoenix Buchanan marauded through cinemas — winning Grant a Bafta nomination — he played the controversial politician Jeremy Thorpe in TV series A Very English Scandal. The real Thorpe was accused of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend Norman Scott, who is played in the drama series by Paddington voice actor Ben Whishaw.

While reviewing this show, The New Yorker hit upon the perfect description of this phase of Grant's career, writing that the actor has "turned out to have a gift for conveying what happens to an individual when charm curdles into something considerably darker".

Grant twisted and curdled his on-screen persona even further in 2019 when he played the slimy private investigator Fletcher in Guy Ritchie's ensemble crime drama The Gentlemen. Fletcher is the movie's unreliable narrator and he's every bit as sexist, racist, and amoral as the rest of the despicable characters in the film. Grant loved the role. "I find that the sleazier and more repellent a character is I play, the better I am," he told Yahoo UK at the time.

Read more: Hugh Grant names the film that saved his career after crushing box office flop (The Independent, 2 min read)

In fact, the villain roles have continued to stack up. In 2020 TV miniseries The Undoing, he again played a murderer and in the 2023 blockbuster Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves he played a Phoenix Buchanan-like con artist. Grant, increasingly, has a lot more fun when he's the bad guy. And the best thing is that the audience does too.

In 2020, he said: “I feel like that part of my career, where I’m the charming leading man, I’m quite happy to have that behind me. I’ve been doing these much more character-y roles recently and enjoying them, and they seem to work quite well. And I didn’t want to go back to sort of just doing a version of Hugh Grant.”

That is the path that has brought him to his new film Heretic, written and directed by A Quiet Place duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Grant plays a mysterious man who is visited by a pair of enthusiastic Mormons hoping to convince him to change religion, only for Grant's character to reveal that he is more than meets the eye — in a bad way.

Read more: Heretic Review: A Handsomely Devilish Hugh Grant Scares Up A Storm In This Super-Smart Horror (Deadline, 4 min read)

The first Heretic reviews have lavished praise upon Grant for his "reptilian" performance as the movie's villain. This could well be the malevolent peak of Grant's late-career resurgence as a slippery, manipulative and truly terrifying bad guy. It seems that once you've been evil enough to try to kill Paddington, there's no going back.

Heretic is in UK cinemas now.