Bollywood? Now, love actually: Hugh Grant

Perhaps we love villains the way we do because people are inherently evil, Hollywood star Hugh Grant said, with a twinkle and a grin, speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Saturday.

- HT Correspondent

It seemed a fitting combination of the two Grants the world has come to know. The actor who redefined the romcom hero as an awkward-witty-messy Everyman in movies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003) has spent the past decade in a sort of villain era, featuring rather malevolently in films such as Paddington 2 (2017), The Gentlemen (2019) and the twisted psychological thriller Heretic (2024), and indulging his love for the “weird” in roles such as that of the unforgettable Oompa-Loompa in Wonka (2023).

"The interesting question to me has always been why audiences prefer the baddie and always have done," said Grant, 65. "I can only guess that it's because we are innately evil... and there is a sort of recognition that our positive characteristics, our niceness, our kindness, is just stuff we plaster on top to make life bearable."

In conversation with actor Rahul Khanna, Grant also talked about his possible Indian roots (his father was born in the subcontinent); how his hotel room was full of shawls and bangles he had haggled over in a local Delhi market the previous day; and, interestingly, how much he disliked what technology had done to the idea of a shared movie-watching experience.