Hugh Grant hopes brutal new thriller will have same impact as disturbing cult horror Midsommar

Feeling a little on edge walking home from the cinema, having the odd nightmare afterwards, jumping out your skin when someone says hello – we’ve all had that horror movie experience where we’ve left full of nerves.

You know, when the film was so intense you feel a little broken. And Hugh Grant wants to create just that as he hopes his brutal new psychological thriller will have the same impact as the disturbing cult horror, Midsommar.

The actor stars in upcoming flick Heretic as the creepy cardigan-clad Mr Reed.

He plays a recluse psychopath who entraps two young door-to-door Mormons as he challenges them on faith. From the original writers of A Quiet Place, the horror is Grant’s first role of the kind and he describes him as ‘really f**ked up and twisted and weird’.

Already having a whopping 92 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its release, Heretic shows the star in a whole other light than we’re used to seeing the usually charming, British love interest of a rom com.

And he wants people to be ‘damaged’ by it.

Grant tells LADbible that he hopes viewers will be impacted in the same way he was when he watched Midsommar ‘by mistake’.

Hugh Grant plays the creepy Mr Reed. (A24)

The 64-year-old explains how one night him and his Swedish wife, Anna Eberstein, were sitting down to watch telly and he thought it would be good to watch ‘something to cheer [them] up’.

Yep, you can see where this is going. “I was looking through these DVDs that had come for the Oscar voting,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Well this looks good, this Swedish one here, it looks quite jolly and summery.’”

And, of course, pretty soon into watching the Florence Pugh folk horror film about a violent cult, he was left thinking: “Who put that on?”

You've not seen him in a role like this before. (A24)

Grant reveals he still now hasn’t ‘really got over’ the experience of watching the 2019 movie as he adds: “And that effect on people is what I’m after with this film.”

With some pretty grim scenes and the star shaking off any pretence of being the loveable male lead, it’s not hard to imagine Heretic is going to have people squirming and desperately rewatching Love Actually this Christmas to try and return to normal.

Admittedly being offered ‘weirder and weirder’ roles in recent years, Grant says he took on Mr Reed because he thought the ‘film was quite original and brave’.

Doing an ‘insane amount of prep’ for the role and looking at ‘real life psychopaths and real life cult leaders’, the actor reckons Heretic does ‘very unusual things in terms of normal horror films’.

Plus, he says A24 is a ‘cool studio’. Well, prepare to be ‘damaged’ lads.

Heretic is in cinemas across the UK and Ireland from 1 November.