Directors of Heretic knew Hugh Grant had a horror villain in him after Cloud Atlas
This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground up throughout the festival.
Hereticthe upcoming A24 horror film from A quiet place writers and Spooky And 65 directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, is not the first film in which Hugh Grant plays a villain. Paddington2, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Operation Fortune: Ruse De GuerreAnd The undo are just a few of his darker roles. But as Woods and Beck revealed in a Q&A after a surprise screening of Heretic At Fantastic Fest, there wasn’t a single film that gave them the idea to cast Grant as the villain in their film.
Heretic stars Yellow vests‘Sophie Thatcher and The Fabelmans‘ Chloe East as Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, two Mormon missionaries whose door-to-door evangelism brings them into contact with Grant’s character, Mr. Reed, a charming man whose evil agenda unfolds for them throughout the film.
As Beck put it, “When we got the script in our hands, it was a big question: Who can perform a play? It has to be someone who opens the door and you don’t immediately feel like there are red flags everywhere. If that’s the case, then Paxton and Barnes don’t feel intelligent. And that’s the whole backbone of this movie, that they’re incredibly intelligent and smart in all their choices. We started trying to figure out who does that during the casting process. And suddenly we started thinking about seeing Cloud Atlas “in 2012.”
“Every time we see a movie together, the credits roll and we look at each other, like, Oh, what did you think?” said Woods. “And Cloud Atlas is a crazy, ambitious, beautiful, crazy movie. And it’s like, what do you say? Cloud Atlas when the credits rolled? We just sat there in silence, stunned, like, What are we talking about? And Scott turns to me and says, ‘Hugh Grant!’ And I said, ‘I know!’ It’s so great to see someone at that point in their career, pushing themselves and being so excited to do something crazy. And then he spent the next 10 years, in our minds, doing that and becoming the best character actor in the world. So when we started thinking about him for this role, we just got so, so excited.”
Like most of the main characters in Cloud AtlasGrant plays a variety of roles set in different times and places in history, from 1849 New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic Hawaii in 2321. Based on the David Mitchell novel of the same name and co-directed by Tom Tykwer and Lana and Lilly Wachowski, the film explores the idea of the same souls being reincarnated into different bodies from era to era, giving the main cast (which includes Grant, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Susan Sarandon) the opportunity to take on roles far outside their usual range.
In Grant’s case, that meant a departure from his familiar, modest leading man roles, often in romantic comedies: In Cloud AtlasHis roles include an evil pastor, an evil CEO, an evil supervisor, and a cannibal chieftain.
“I mean, it felt to us like we were seeing him for the first time in American cinema with Four weddings and a funeral“When that came in ’94, this person was very charming and very approachable,” Beck said. “And he created this relationship with the audience — we were like, We love the idea of using that as a weapon, turning it on its head and taking everything the audience loves about him and making it a terrifying beat, beat by beat. It’s something we love, like when we saw Love full of drunkenness in 2002, and saw Adam Sandler take what he’s known for, but turn it completely upside down and find that relationship with the audience that makes it accessible, but then (do) something totally unique with it. That was the ambition in bringing Hugh in.”
Heretic will be released in U.S. theaters on November 8.