While recent years have seen Hugh Grant take on such edgy roles as a murderous politician in “A Very English Scandal” and a sleazy PI in his upcoming film “The Gentlemen”, he’ll always be best known for his string of hit romantic comedies in the 1990s.
The 59-year-old actor will soon be seen in “The Undoing”, in which he plays the seemingly upstanding husband of Nicole Kidman’s character, eventually revealed to be not what he seems.
Grant and Kidman appeared Wednesday at the Television Critics Association press tour to promote the new miniseries, and he explained why he’s been gravitating toward playing more morally questionable characters.
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“First of all, hang on, you don’t know from what you’ve seen whether I’m nasty. If you’ve seen two [episodes of the show], you know I’m not entirely as lovely a I seem in [episode] one, but you don’t know if I’m evil or not,” told TV critics, reports TV Guide.
“As for playing characters that are not delightful, I’ve done nothing else really for the past six years. I’ve been consistently vile. Watch the film, ‘The Gentleman’, that comes out next week. If you want to see me at my worst, that’s it,” he added.
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In fact, he admitted that it’s “such a relief [to play bad guys]. I can’t tell you. Richard Curtis, who wrote all of those romantic comedies did a lot of — it always used to make him laugh that people thought I was that nice, public, Englishman, because he knew that exactly the reverse was true. It’s very nice to be closer to home.”
