We are deep into the mid-career renaissance of Hugh Grant. After becoming the romantic comedy king in the ’90s and early ’00s, he’s spent the last five years or so going in a markedly different direction with dramatic roles in “Florence Foster Jenkins” and “A Very English Scandal.” And, of course, who can forget his iconic musical turn in “Paddington 2.” But with last fall’s HBO mini-series “The Undoing,” Grant showed he could bring a significantly darker character to life.
Note: There will be major spoilers in this piece about who did what in “The Undoing.”
READ MORE: Susanne Bier didn’t compromise her vision for “The Undoing”
The Susanne Bier directed series found Grant portraying Jonathan Fraser, a New York City oncologist, accused of murdering his mistress, Sylvia (Lily Rabe). As the story unfolds, Jonathan’s wife Grace (Nicole Kidman), tries to come to grips with the possibility that the father of their teenage son (Noah Jupe) could commit such a heinous crime. But the more she learns the more she slowly realizes Jonathan is an emotional hustler of psychotic proportions.
With SAG Awards voting right around the corner, Grant jumped on the phone last month to discuss the mini-series’ impressive ratings, the gruesome take of Sylvia’s murder you didn’t see on screen, and why someone seemingly as smart as Jonathan would leave the murder weapon almost in plain sight.
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The Playlist: How surprised were you that “The Undoing” was such a big hit? The viewership just kept getting bigger and bigger every week.
Hugh Grant: That was a lovely thing to happen. I mean, I always take a gloomy view of life and assume everything’s going to be a disaster. And one has to cling to these good things that happen in life and then try and enjoy them. I’ve almost forgotten how to enjoy anything.
I don’t know if you’re on social media per se, but as the weeks went on, viewers became more and more invested and had their own theories about who did what. Did you pay attention to that at all? Were you curious about what people thought?
Oh, yeah, because I’m unaccustomed to the whole TV process, really. And one of the oddities of it from my point of view is that as it’s being broadcast, you can see via Twitter what people are actually thinking, whether they like it, whether they don’t like it, or they like this character, that character, this bit, that bit. It’s absolutely riveting. I sat there, particularly in episode six, at 2:00 in the morning English time with my telephone trembling in my hand because I was always worried would they enjoy episode six and all that car ride at the end and everything. And when they did, it was a massive relief.
What was the appeal of the project? Was it Nicole? Was it Susanne?
They were definitely a huge part of the appeal because they’re brilliant. This was a very classy offer. David E. Kelley [who adapted the series from Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel] is very classy. HBO is classy. So I was three-quarters of the way to saying yes anyway, just on the basis of the marquee there. But it was only one episode that had been written at that stage, and I did need to know that I was the killer because to be just the unfaithful husband who spends six episodes apologizing and then turns out to be innocent of the murder would have been considerably less interesting than to be a total narcissistic sociopath.
Speaking of Jonathan, did you think of him as an evil character?
He’s incapable of human compassion, which is the definition really of a sociopath, and the love he demonstrates for his family, in particular, is really love of himself. He loves them because they love him, the “great” Jonathan Fraser. And I was very interested in that, in the fact that someone could appear to be so loving and so giving. He’s a great healer of children and yet actually have no compassion at all and be quite capable of smashing a woman’s head to pieces and really not thinking twice about it.
Was that always the intention in the scene where he reveals he has no remorse? It was somewhat shocking that he doesn’t even come close to feeling sorry for his actions.
No, he’s none of that. I stopped only once, which is to spit a bit of brains out that has got into my mouth. And I did improvise on one take, having smashed her head, whatever it is, 12 times with that sculpting hammer, as a doctor, it was quite interesting to see her brains and so I started playing around with them a bit with my fingers. But I felt, I think that was even for Susanne Bier who likes things dark, that was just a little too dark.
That would definitely be a little too dark. It’s interesting that you refer to how manipulative he is. He clearly knows what he’s doing, but he still makes these huge mistakes. He leaves the hammer in a place that someone could easily find it. How did you justify that?
The thing about how badly hidden the hammer was, I did struggle to justify that for an intelligent man, but I remember now how I did it. It was because you see, he’s got this hammer in a plastic bag. He’s hiding near the beach house. He spots a perfect opportunity to go and talk to Grace, sitting out there on the veranda, so he quickly hides the hammer, knowing that he’s going to charm Grace and he’ll have plenty of time to come back later and get rid of it properly, probably in the sea. But of course, she calls the police and he’s arrested before he can hide the hammer. That’s how I justified it. But some of these things are coming from a screenwriter who is thinking, “How do I create a brilliant cliffhanger at the end of episode five by having the hammer turn up in the boy’s violin case?” So he’s working from one point of view and then the actor has to justify it from the other end, sometimes with some convolutions
When I spoke to Susanne a couple of months ago, she talked about the fact that her normal process is rehearsals in the morning and shooting in the afternoon, or at least rehearsals first. How did that process work for you and was markedly different from other projects you’d worked on?
Well, I was warned that she likes to do much longer rehearsals than are customary on a film set. I mean, we do always have a lineup, which is like a cursory rehearsal. We sort of mumble through the lines, work out where everyone’s going to stand or sit, and the DP and the director work out where to put the cameras, but that’s usually quite brief. And I was warned that it was going to be much longer than that, and it wasn’t really. There was a couple of days when it was longer, much longer, and you could see money people starting to sweat as it got to lunchtime and not a single frame had been shot. But in the end, the proof is in the pudding, and I do believe Susanne Bier is a great, great filmmaker. I came across her about 10 years ago when we discussed making…it was like a kind of romantic comedy really, but dark, or darker than normal, and that’s when I watched all her Danish films. And if you haven’t seen them, you absolutely have to. They’re sensational.
Absolutely.
She is a proper, very cinematic film director. Extremely European, and for a time was part of that whole dogma movement, which was a very sort of purist line of filmmaking where you can’t use artificial light and all that. So I think that the combination of that kind of directing and an extremely commercial American script is always interesting. Polanski‘s films were rather like that. His sort of twisted, Polish vision married to quite … well, extremely well done commercial writing, like in “Rosemary’s Baby,” made for very interesting results.
That’s an interesting comparison in a way because both take place in upscale worlds of New York, where things are not what they seem. What do you think the fascination is for audiences who are sort of obsessed with rich people and their problems?
It’s ancient, isn’t it? It’s hard to say why, but I mean, the ancient Greeks wanted to hear stories about the gods, and [a lot of] Shakespeare’s plays were written about kings. And I don’t know, we have our noses permanently pressed up against the window of something more glittery inside. We love that voyeurism, and particularly when things go badly for the privileged.
Outside of the scene at the end of the series when Jonathan’s actions are revealed but were there any other moments during production that you particularly enjoyed?
Well, fun is not the first word you’d use for a lot of those scenes because they’re pretty heavy, but [there is] a sequence where the trial has started, the cop has been interrogated, and then I take the family out for a lunch in rather a posh restaurant. And we can’t talk about anything because they keep bringing more amuse-bouche dishes and breadsticks and all that. I liked all that crackling along. And then I kind of run out of the room and confess or fake confess about my dead sister. I remember thinking in the script that this is going to work well. This is juicy. And I always found that the stuff about the daughter genuinely moving, but maybe because I’ve got a little daughter that’s that age so I thought I might have a chance of being convincingly upset here.
“The Undoing” is available on HBO and HBO Max.