If you had told me 20 years ago that Hugh Grant would one day play some of my favorite queer and queer-coded characters, I would have asked, “Is there another Hugh Grant?”
The Notting Hill star was cinema’s undisputed rom-com king for much of the 1990s and 2000s, drawing in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office with his awkward charms and posh accent. Between Julia Roberts, Andie MacDowell, Sandra Bullock, and Drew Barrymore, Grant played opposite almost every modern actress who has ever been called “America’s sweetheart.”
But today, as Grant approaches a possible Emmy win for playing the closeted English MP Jeremy Thorpe in the BBC miniseries A Very English Scandal — right on the heels of his delightful gay-coded turn in Paddington 2 — it’s clear that the actor has found more interesting material to work with now that he’s declared himself officially done with rom-coms. Not only that, Grant is playing some of the most delightful characters of his career, and helping to prove that LGBTQ+ viewers crave complex representation.
Too many LGBTQ+-themed movies and shows give us plucky protagonists who have mere quirks instead of real flaws. That trend is understandable: After decades spent enduring films and television shows that associate queerness with villainy, it’s tempting to push back with bubblegum heroes who can do no wrong. What I’ve found, though, is that straight audiences are often a lot more interested than queer audiences in sanitized love stories and inspirational biopics. I’ll always root for more LGBTQ+ representation, but some of what we’ve gotten puts me straight to sleep.
Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe, on the other hand, is absolutely riveting. In the series, an actor who once played the same straight bachelor over and over again gives a career-defining performance, perfectly capturing Thorpe’s gregariousness and his cunning. Grant faces stiff Emmys competition this year for the limited series acting honor, with contenders like Sam Rockwell, Benicio Del Toro, and Jharrel Jerome making the category a crowded one. But Grant’s Thorpe is still a standout.
Thorpe, for those who need a brief refresher, was a British politician and former leader of the Liberal Party. In 1979, he was tried on murder conspiracy charges for allegedly ordering the killing of a same-sex lover named Norman Scott who threatened to publicly expose their relationship. Scott survived what he alleged was a bungled hit job. Thorpe was acquitted on all counts but never served in parliament again, living out the rest of his life with his wife Marion, who supported him throughout the trial.
It’s easy to see why the story would make for a best-selling book and, now, an award-nominated miniseries: The Thorpe trial was twisty and turny — and much like the Oscar Wilde trial before it, a key barometer of homophobia in Britain. Thorpe was a political powerhouse before the public learned about his relationship with Scott; afterward, he was effectively finished, described by the Washington Post as “a ruined man.”
But more compelling than A Very English Scandal’s plot is Grant himself. He portrays Thorpe as a narcissist, but to do so, he doesn’t simply turn up his already-ample charms; rather, the actor captures the insecurity and vulnerability at the heart of Thorpe’s unassailable self-belief. Emotions flicker on and off Grant’s face, faint but still detectable, and always it reverts back to the same wan politician’s smile. The pain of the closet, and the lengths to which Thorpe would go to stay inside of it, are evident in Grant’s eyes, even when he’s merrily tucking into a steak dinner.
There’s a devastating scene near the end of A Very English Scandal after Thorpe is acquitted, in which his barrister George Carman asks why he chose to be in a relationship with Scott, of all men. Thorpe, still not admitting to the affair, speaks elliptically about the violence he faced while hooking up with rougher men whose homophobia-induced self-loathing led them to lash out.
“If you do know those men, George,” Thorpe says, “then you know those nights, and you know how those nights can end.” Images of Thorpe being beaten up and mugged flash on the screen before he continues: “Given those men, maybe, I suppose one could imagine, that Norman Scott was the best.”
Grant delivers the line as if from a faraway place, biting his lip, before reestablishing his cheerful façade with a playful lift of the eyebrows. It is a jaw-dropping moment. No wonder Grant has been earning the finest reviews of his life for the role. (Vanity Fair’s Emily Yoshida called his performance “endlessly layered,” for one.) Nor is it a surprise that a closeted and morally-compromised politician has proved to be such a compelling LGBTQ+ character. Grant’s Thorpe is no model for the community, sure, but he is fascinating to watch — and he’s precisely what we need to see more of right now.
Years from now, the queer characters that will stick in our minds will likely prove to be the thorny ones, not the smoothly-polished stones. Queerness can be messy, and media that reflects that reality back to us will resonate more deeply than media that tries to make us too neat and self-contained. The Favourite, a darkly comic historical dramedy featuring Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone competing for the romantic attention of Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne, was a gift to every queer women who has suffered through dozens of trope-laden, formulaic lesbian romance movies. And Killing Eve’s bisexual assassin Villanelle will be GIFed into eternity, while so many other characters fade into the past.
Creators are finally figuring out that they can give us queer villains without passing an implicit or explicit moral judgment on their queerness. If Hitchcock had made A Very English Scandal fifty years ago, for example, it’s quite possible that Jeremy Thorpe’s interest in men would have been depicted as menacing in and of itself, à la Bruno in Strangers on a Train. Given that history, it’s refreshing to watch an actor like Grant play a closeted queer character who brute-forces his way through an attempted murder trial, while the series itself (written by Queer As Folk creator Russell T. Davies) condemns the homophobia of the day. Finally, Hollywood is allowing queer characters to be malevolent — sometimes, even murderous — without making it seem like their sexual orientation is the root of their immorality.
And if there’s any actor who’s benefited from that trend, it’s Grant. Back in 1987, before he became a rom-com A-lister, Grant actually did played a closeted man in James Ivory’s Maurice, an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel set in WWI-era Britain about an English man smitten with a university classmate who later leaves him to marry a woman. A younger and less experienced Grant, who plays the classmate, isn’t as capable of portraying the pain of the closet as he is today. In all, it’s a movie that “may seem old hat to today’s moviegoers,” as them. has noted — precisely the kind of film that helps advance LGBTQ+ representation, even if it ultimately fails to be memorable.
Fast forward three decades, and Grant has given us one of film’s most fabulous villains (Paddington 2’s Phoenix Buchanan) and one of television’s most interesting queer character in back-to-back years. And if you think it’s a stretch to read Phoenix Buchanan as gay, Grant certainly doesn’t. The actor told Business Insider that Buchanan was “possibly gay, though we never really get into it,” explaining that “he lives on his own, he spends a lot on face cream, and [he’s] into bears.”
Yes, you read that right: Hugh Grant, once the heartthrob in every straight rom-com under the sun, is out here making bear puns. Whether or not he wins an Emmy, he is certainly winning himself a beloved and unexpected place in the LGBTQ+ canon.
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