Hugh Grant has lived many lives in the cinematic landscape of pop culture.
He was the premiere British softie of the ‘90s, becoming everyone's ideal man with the likes of Four Weddings and Funeral and Notting Hill back-to-back. Then, a decade later, he became cinema's favourite fuckboi, like in Bridget Jones's Diary and Music and Lyrics; the guy who allows the nice leading lady to soften their edges. In more recent years he's often occupied a sort of jovial grump status, rocking up in films like Wonka and Paddington 2 as camp villains, which he approaches like a man who pretends he doesn't want to wear a novelty Christmas cracker hat at the dinner table but secretly enjoys the goofy spirit of the whole affair.
Since the ‘80s, Hugh Grant has occupied our screens, jumping from iconic role to iconic character. And while he's suffered the blow of multiple eras of typecasting, a quick scan of his filmography shows a man who simply can't miss. Here are 10 roles that prove he's one of the best to ever do it, ranked!
10. Maurice (1987)
Maurice, otherwise known as Gay Yearning: A Movie, is a film partially about how young Hugh Grant was so hot you'd momentarily risk criminalisation and social expulsion just to give him a little smooch. In all seriousness, the Merchant Ivory classic is a beautifully painted portrait of gay love in the early 1900s and how some, but not all, carved out quiet ways to live out their authentic lives. Grant plays Clive Durham, a closeted student who professes early his love for the boyish titular character, only to choose a life of repressive heteronormativity for the sake of his reputation. It's an early glint of the emotional restraint that would become a hallmark of Grant's later roles. You can watch Maurice on Amazon.
9. Love Actually (2003)
Love Actually is unrealistic in so many ways, like how Colin Firth falls in love with a woman he's never really spoken to and how Keira Knightley doesn't immediately pepper spray her husband's creepy best mate. But perhaps its most glaring dip into the fantastical comes in making the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, played by Hugh Grant, hot and charming. Sorry, it's a step too far. Richard Curtis gave us Tony Blair by way of Hollywood and cast his longtime collaborator in the role to give it a Grant-ian level of gravitas, which is to say the character is sardonically captivating while also sometimes being just ever so reluctantly sincere. It's hard not to root for a character who blows up a historic special geopolitical relationship with America because he's so horrifically down bad for the tea lady. You can watch Love Actually on Amazon.
8. Sense and Sensibility (1995)
There's a moment at the end of Sense and Sensibility (spoilers!) where Emma Thompson's Elinor erupts into heaving, snotty sobs in front of Hugh Grant's Edward when she finds out he's not married to another woman and it's probably one of the most relatable reactions in all of film history. We get it. Despite being such an icon of the ‘90s, there's something distinctively period about the way young Grant looks. His profile wouldn't go amiss on one of those old-timey cameo pendants. The film came out right in the middle of Grant's peak soft boi era, nestled between Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, solidifying him as a kind of maestro of bumbling charm. You can watch Sense and Sensibility on Netflix.
7. Cloud Atlas (2012)
OK, saying this at the top – we don't know what Cloud Atlas is about. No one knows what Cloud Atlas is about, and if they say they do, they're lying. All The Wachowskis had was a $100m budget and a fever dream, adapting a book about six interlocking dimensional stories with the same actors hopping across multiple genres and portraying thematically similar but different characters (sometimes quite problematically, considering the film's use of racialising make-up). The reason we include Cloud Atlas in this list is because it did something ambitious, not least because it gave Hugh Grant a chance to remove himself for a bit from playing man-children with arrested development. In this, he played a lascivious reverend, a monstrous CEO and a literal cannibal, to name just a few. You can't credit Cloud Atlas for a lot (it was a spectacular flop!), but we think it probably has a lot to answer for when it comes to Grant's later-stage career renaissance. You can watch Cloud Atlas on Amazon.
6. The Gentlemen (2019)
You could just play Hugh Grant saying ‘Don’t be cunty' in his laboured cockney accent from The Gentlemen on loop for an hour and a half and it would warrant a place on this list. If we weren't so terrified of our phones making a single sound, it would make a great text tone. In many ways, Grant's role in The Gentleman feels like one of those ‘how this song would sound sung by another artist' AI prompts if the prompt was ‘make Hugh Grant sound like he’s in a Guy Ritchie movie'. He plays a gruff private investigator and aspirational screenwriter in this crime caper about London's gang underbelly. Once again, any film where Hugh Grant is required to ‘Act’ with a capital A lands him on this list because it's such a joy to see him given free rein to fully let loose. You can watch The Gentlemen on Amazon.
5. About a Boy (2002)
After earning a reputation as the dependable twenty-something soft boi of the big screen, as Hugh Grant edged into his late thirties and forties, he carved out a niche of playing slightly broken men slipping out of their prime – men who were clinging onto the irresponsibility of youth while adulthood loudly banged on the door. In About a Boy, he addresses the folly of the typecast he'd professionally and personally been funnelled into by playing a North London nepo baby quickly realising doing nothing with your life isn't that appealing. He then ends up as a surrogate father to a troubled kid (played by Nicholas Hoult) who lands on his doorstep and gets pulled into the chaotic swirl of his difficult home life. It's a smart, affecting and multilayered role; he deftly moves between comedy and drama, and you can almost see the hard shell of his exterior chip away in real time into something more tender. You can watch About a Boy on Channel 4.
4. A Very English Scandal (2018)
At many points in Hugh Grant's career, he seems to have fallen into the trap of being pushed into playing one thing at a time. In A Very English Scandal, he revels in getting to play multiple things at once. Playing ‘70s Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe in this true story about one of the UK's biggest political scandals (Thorpe attempted to put a hit out on his secret gay lover and got caught, for those not up to speed), he gets to be sly, sarcastic, tender, duplicitous, sincere, villainous and vulnerable – all the things Hugh Grant does best! In many ways, this series is the apex of Grant's late-stage career turn and he seems to be having the time of his life with it. And yes, he is boning his Paddington co-star Ben Whishaw in it. You can watch A Very English Scandal on BBC iPlayer.
3. Notting Hill (1999)
Everything about Notting Hill is a ‘90s goldmine. Julia Roberts' tiny sunglasses, a bookshop on a high street dedicated purely to vintage travel books, the notion of affordable housing in North West London. As romcoms go, it's perfect, and Hugh Grant is perfect in it as a foppish, soft normie falling in love with the world's biggest movie star. Decades before the concept of the soft boi was valorised in pop culture, we had Hugh Grant as William Thacker. While you were out partying, he studied the blade. He learned the art of the perfect, low-maintenance curtain bang blow-out. He mastered the louche sling of a smart casual sport coat over one shoulder. He conquered the wobbly syntax of a spluttering declaration of love. He was the one true emperor of British schmaltz, whether he seemed to like it or not. You can watch Notting Hill on Amazon.
2. Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
As Hugh Grant was edging himself out of the sincere softies that made him a ‘90s icon, the ‘00s brought him a tougher edge; the kind of characters with a bit of knowing duplicity to them. Assholes, basically. Bridget Jones's Diary's Daniel Cleaver is a revelation. He's what would happen if the nice guys of Grant's early career had drunk their own Kool-Aid a little and realised that everyone would happily have let them treat them like shit. He's obnoxious, pretentious, morally repugnant and an HR disaster, but when he falls out of the boat after shouting “Fuck me I love Keats” with a wet cigarette hanging out of his mouth, well, your honour, you see, he's innocent. The vibes were just too immaculate. You can watch Bridget Jones's Diary on Amazon.
1. Paddington 2 (2017)
There is not a shred of hyperbole here when we say that Hugh Grant not being nominated for an Oscar for Paddington 2 is one of the greatest crimes of modern cinema. He didn't even get a BAFTA nomination. From his own people! Has Paddington taught us nothing about lifting up our local community? No, but seriously, whoever overlooked this performance should be forced to parade down the street with the Game of Thrones lady shouting ‘Shame!’ over and over again. In the film, he plays Phoenix Buchanan, a washed-up actor with delusions of grandiosity, a role Grant says he was handpicked for by director Paul King. After mastering the apex hetero fuckboi for so long, it's wild that, all along, the perfect role for Hugh Grant was a deliciously camp cartoon villain. Considering the great roles that came after, Paddington 2 feels like the first time Grant realised he could run wild, hamming it up at every turn without a shred of self-consciousness. Legend says a single viewing of the film's final musical number led by Grant has the ability to raise the UK's Happiness Index by at least six points. You can watch Paddington 2 on Netflix.
