Ten years ago, if you’d asked anyone to sum up the constituent parts of a Hugh Grant movie, their answer might have gone something like this. Grant plays a charming posho with a knack for transforming even the most straightforward piece of dialogue into a bumbling collage of “erm”s and “aah”s. He exclaims “bugger!” a lot, often while bumping into various beautiful women. The floppiness of his fringe is inversely proportional to his level of caddishness (if his hair’s longer, he’s nice; if it’s shorter, run). And if Richard Curtis isn’t in the director’s seat, then his name is quite probably lurking somewhere in the credits.
For a very long time, thanks to films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, Grant was synonymous with a particular sub-genre of romantic hero: one who lived in a nice part of west London and was good at swearing Britishly. Now, though, that has all changed. By his own admission, the 64-year-old is in the “freak show period” of his career. The man who was one of the most pigeonholed actors of the Nineties and Noughties has carved out a new niche, gleefully leaning into playing characters that are “twisted, ugly, weird [and] misshapen” (again, his words). Hugh 2.0 has earned some of the best reviews of his career so far. But as celebrated as this second act has been, it does make you wonder: has Grant simply swapped one form of typecasting for another, replacing the romcom stammerer with the unhinged oddball? Is he about to get trapped in another, stranger box?
