“I feel very overworked,” Hugh Grant says with a drawl. He’s reclined on a couch in the posh Upper East Side hotel suite he’s temporarily calling home, leaning so far back into the cushions that he’s practically supine. He’s being deliberately ironic, but I also believe him. On the way to our meeting, I walked past a phalanx of trucks and trailers outside the house his and Nicole Kidman’s married couple will share in the upcoming HBO limited series The Undoing. His hotel is just across the street; he can see it from the open window. Not a bad commute, but it’s been three months, and Grant is still a newcomer to the often strenuous schedule of a TV actor. “It’s way too long—way too long,” he says with still-fresh horror. He’s due back on set at some point later in the afternoon if the turbulent New York weather cooperates, and his gaze keeps anxiously drifting back to his fictional town house.

“I’m such a baby about television. I didn’t even realize that HBO is considered kind of the crème de la crème.” He glances at me with a bit of uncertainty. “Is that right?” I confirm to the HBO star that HBO is a pretty good place to be.

The Undoing is his second small-screen gig since the BBC One/Amazon Prime Video miniseries A Very English Scandal, which was for all intents and purposes the TV debut of Hugh Grant, movie star. But it all comes amid an exciting revival for Grant in general, who is finally getting the kinds of colorful character actor roles he excelled at even in the days when his sad-puppy good looks seemed determined to typecast him as a romantic lead. His performance in A Very English Scandal, as disgraced MP Jeremy Thorpe, is a satisfying curdling of so many of Grant’s trademarks—the rakish charm, the massive ego ripe for a comeuppance—with a very private vulnerability lurking underneath.

And perhaps television—way too long as it may be—has allowed for a full appreciation of what Grant has always been capable of. The actor, now 58, has been accused in the past of leaning on an arsenal of tics, mugging his way through some roles in the ’90s and 2000s. But his performance as Thorpe is endlessly layered; the familiar glad-handing just barely papering over the wounded narcissism of a closeted gay politician never able to have a relationship on his own terms. The Golden Globes and Emmys are a little notorious for getting starstruck by film actors venturing to television, but the fact that Grant has earned nominations from both for his Scandal performance doesn’t just feel like the TV world falling over itself to welcome a movie star to its ranks—Hugh Grant might be doing the best work of his life right now.

The A-lister “comeback” is as much a social phenomenon as an industry one these days, complete with memes, cameos, stunty interviews, and breathless revisionism of the comebacker in question. Grant’s return feels different, in large part because it happened so gradually, and at first glance, it’s not exactly clear where it began.

It’s pretty clear where the last phase ended, though: 2009’s Did You Hear About the Morgans?—his third film with Two Weeks Notice and Music and Lyrics director Marc Lawrence. It had been a fruitful partnership—comeback impresario Quentin Tarantino, of all people, at one time gave their work together his stamp of approval, saying Lawrence had “a perfect leading man”—but between a disappointing box office and miserable reviews, it seemed a wall had been hit. For a few years—besides two voice-work appearances in the Aardman Animations Pirates! series—Grant was largely out of the movies.

“I’ve always been a reluctant actor. So taking a break wasn’t a great hardship, especially as I was so bound up in this political campaign,” Grant says. Following a buzzy 2011 exposé of an ex-paparazzo he wrote for New Statesman, Grant became a passionate advocate for the group Hacked Off, which called for political inquiry into the widespread practice of phone hacking by the British press. “That was all fascinating and dramatic, and really refreshing as well, to do something that was completely nothing to do with showbiz.”

One of his targets in particular became Rupert Murdoch and News International, figures you don’t see many actors swinging against so publicly. As Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw put it in a 2011 op-ed, “Very often [Grant] had given the impression that he wouldn’t be fussed if he never made another movie ever again. Plenty of stars hate Murdoch’s papers, but they want to appear in movies made by Murdoch’s Fox group.”

When Grant did begin to dip his toe back into acting, it was not exactly a predictable slate. He played a typically deadpan secret service agent in Guy Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but he also appeared in Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ 2012 film Cloud Atlas as no fewer than six characters, among them a murderous Kona chief in far-future Hawaii. There were a lot of question marks around Grant’s onscreen future, and when Paddington director and writer Paul King and his cowriter Simon Farnaby reached out to him while seeking a villain for the follow-up, they decided to address them head-on. “He seemed to have sort of retired at the time,” King recalls. “We wrote this very awkward letter—‘We’ve come up with this role, of a kind of vain, washed-up old ham, whose best days are sort of behind him, his lips are sort of heading south along with his jawline, and we thought of you.’ Luckily he saw the funny side.”

That might be Grant’s greatest asset now—his lack of vanity, his sense of humor about himself, his utter refusal to get too high-minded about the abstractions of acting. As Phoenix Buchanan he’s breathtakingly funny and committed, without a trace of irony about sharing scenes with a CGI bear in a red hat (voiced, in a pleasing twist, by his future A Very English Scandal costar Ben Whishaw). But the welcome wagon for the Grantaissance had a slow start. “I was presenting I think at the Golden Globes, and they do that thing when you walk out, and they say, ‘From the forthcoming Paddington 2, Hugh Grant.’ And someone showed me Twitter afterwards, and it was…people were full of derision. ‘Christ, has it come to that. Poor old Hugh. Paddington 2. Sequel to a kids film.’ ” Grant smiles a bit ruefully. “It’s particularly annoying in the case of Paddington 2, because I genuinely believe it may be the best film I’ve ever been in.”

The performance shares some DNA with Florence Foster Jenkins’s St. Clair Bayfield, whom Grant played opposite Meryl Streep’s titular society dame in 2016. Both were faded actors, both asked Grant to tap into his tenure as a small-time regional theater Shakespeare player in his 20s, the side of him that he says still recites soliloquies to himself when drunk. (“All the famous ones from Hamlet, including ‘To Be or Not to Be’—I’m terribly good at that one.”)

But there’s also a generosity in both performances that felt particular to post-hiatus Grant. In Paddington 2, it’s the degree to which he has invested himself in the fanciful world of a children’s film. In Florence, as the manager of his wife’s quixotic singing career, he found pathos in the ham, a fierce protectiveness of his partner symbiotically linked to his own insecurities. The latter role earned him Golden Globe, SAG, and BAFTA nominations (the Oscar nod remained elusive, something he swears he doesn’t care about). It was also his first time working with A Very English Scandal director Stephen Frears.

“When I signed up to do Florence Foster Jenkins, I thought, Oh Christ, Stephen Frears. He’s really kind of arsey, important filmmaker. And it will be an awful lot of deep, dense talk about character and motivation and plot.” But he was pleasantly surprised to find that Frears was as no-nonsense in his approach to filmmaking as Grant was to acting. “I went to my first meeting with him, armed with intelligent questions. To each one, he said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ There’s not much prodding…he knows when it’s not right. He sits there at the monitor looking very sad—‘Do it again.’ ”

“I’ve just always thought Hugh was a very, very good actor,” Frears told me. “And because he does light comedy, people tend to ignore that.” It wasn’t long before Frears came to Grant with another script, this one a three-part miniseries about Jeremy Thorpe, a British MP whose clandestine affair with a younger man named Norman Scott (played by Whishaw)—and his alleged efforts to have Scott murdered—earned him no small amount of notoriety during a highly publicized trial in 1979. It was a juicy role to say the least, but Grant hesitated. “[I was] trying to find reasons not to do the job which is…I specialize in that,” he says. “I sort of fear acting so much, or fear performing, I can always find reasons not to do something. I said, ‘I’m too old.’ ” Which is not inaccurate—the miniseries spans two decades and begins when Thorpe first meets Scott in his early 30s; Grant was 57 at the time of production. But Frears eventually convinced him. “I owe him a lot,” Grant says. “He thinks I can do stuff that I would never have thought I could do.”

The Thorpe Affair, as it was known, was a scandal that had O.J. Simpson-level real estate in the British media at the time, and one Grant remembers well from his adolescence. “It was a fabulous scandal,” he says with a kind of wonderment, as if he were describing a five-course meal or a particularly well-aged wine. “It had a sort of Monty Python element, because it was happening in the ’70s, sort of the last glimmer of old-fashioned British establishment, men in pinstripe suits, all backing each other up. So to have it all unraveling around this one man with murder and clandestine homosexuality, ‘biting the pillow,’ ”—the phrase Scott used in court when describing his first sexual encounter with Thorpe—“it was all brilliant.”

It was also one of the first times that homosexuality was being discussed in a sustained way in mainstream British culture. “My parents, I can remember, if the subject of homosexuality came up, they had that kind of 1950s, 1960s attitude. It was sort of, ‘Well, it happens, darling. And it’s a little bit disgusting. We don’t talk about it very much,’ ” Grant says. “I can remember my brother and me sitting in the back of the car saying, ‘Yeah, but what do they do? What do they do to each other?’ ”

But aside from the sensationalism of the affair, and its historic and social significance, there’s the volatile humanity of both its leads, and the stark contrast of Whishaw’s Scott, who eventually chooses to live as openly gay, and Thorpe, who clings to his generation’s notion of respectability. Watching Grant’s Thorpe dig himself further and further into an irredeemable hole, one can’t help but feel some pity for him, despite everything.

“It’s helpful to find the tragedy of the character you’re playing,” Grant says. “I think that having to live a lie was a sort of sadness to [Thorpe] all his life. And I also think that his narcissism, which by all accounts was kind of out of control, was a source of unhappiness. Because it stops you from really caring about other people and loving them and feeling embraced. He only really adored himself, and I think that’s a kind of torture.”

Something else happened during Grant’s time away from the screen—he became a father, ultimately five times over. In 2018, he married Swedish former television producer Anna Eberstein, the mother of three of his children; now he’s the very busy co-parent of a seven-year-old, two six-year-olds, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old.

“It’s sort of taken the lid off my ­bottled-up English emotions,” he says of parenthood in his 50s. “I hate to talk this way, because it sounds so smug. And I used to loathe people who would say, ‘Hugh, you’ve got to have children. You haven’t really lived until you have.’ I hated those people. But there’s an element of truth. It’s one of those things you didn’t know you needed until you’ve done it.”

Grant talks about his family life much like he talks about his political activity—the real stuff, the important counterpoint to everything else. His children, he says, are “banned” from his profession. “The older ones, I’ve seen in a few school plays. And luckily, they display no talent.”

“If I knew lots and lots of happy actors, I would recommend it. But seeing as I’ve never met a happy actor, I can’t,” he says. “I’m just speaking off the top of my head, but the acting gene seems to me to come from people who have a relatively flimsy grasp of who they are. I’m not going to name names, but if you said to me, ‘What do you think of X?’ I’ll say, ‘Well, I have no idea who that person is.’ Because they’re always performing. They perform brilliantly, but you’ve no sense of them. And I think that’s a miserable way to live.”

The brilliance of Grant’s performance in A Very English Scandal may very well be that he has portrayed Jeremy Thorpe as such an actor, a person “cursed,” as he says, to be an empty vessel, a cultivator of surfaces. It feels personal because it comes from a personal anxiety. How do you continue working and keep from being that person? I ask. “I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am that person,” Grant replies frankly.

But I think he’s being a bit hard on himself. Grant’s break from acting was defined by undertakings—political and personal—that asked him to step outside himself. Perhaps this was all spurred by a nagging sense that he was turning into a toxic solipsist, but there are plenty of actors—and politicians, and public figures in general—who never find that self-awareness. And nothing will get one outside of oneself faster than becoming a parent. “If you ask me, that’s what’s happened,” says Frears of Grant then vs. Grant now. “He had children and simply grew up.”

“I think it’s possible that having children has made me better at acting,” Grant says, with no irony this time. “I mean, it’s a terrible cliché, but just sort of pure, unconditional love. It’s quite useful to have experienced it.”

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