The English actor and American rom-com import Hugh Grant has always been an enigma in plain sight. His talent for portraying the adorable cad or slightly awkward matinee idol in romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) burnished his global reputation as Generation X’s Cary Grant. But the devilishly handsome sexagenarian has accomplished a startling transformation over the last decade, rebranding himself as a character actor in a variety of villainous roles such as the closeted MP and murder conspirator Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal and the wily actor-slash-thief Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2 .
In truth, Grant’s recent turn is less an evolution than the belated continuation of a riskier, and sometimes darker, early career path eventually diverted by rom-coms. Among his dramatic roles were as a rakish colonial playboy (and possible accessory to murder) in the 1980s cult film White Mischief , a voyeuristic swinger in Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992), and a narcissistic theater director in An Awfully Big Adventure (1995). Added to these were parts in outré Gothic films like Rowing With the Wind (1988) and Ken Russell’s unclassifiable The Lair of the White Worm (1988), an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s lesser-known vampire novel.
Taken together, Grant’s juvenilia begin to offer a fuller picture of the actor’s predilection for what he calls the “freak-show” aesthetic, far r.