8. Hugh Grant - Cloud Atlas
You have to appreciate it whenever a famous actor renowned for playing incredibly similar roles suddenly opts to do something a bit different - and in the case of Hugh Grant's turn in
Cloud Atlas, he opted to do, like, eight or nine different things all at once, playing a variety of characters from violent cannibal to, uh, a Korean guy. Sure makes a change from "bumbling English gentlemen" and - yes - "bumbling English gentlemen," huh? If you've seen the movie, you'll know that the premise requires a small number of actors to play lots of different roles. So whereas Grant throws himself into
Cloud Atlas with an impressive amount of gusto (and does so alongside talents such as Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, who feel much more at home here, despite the barmy nature of the movie's six interconnected stories and the near on thirty characters inhabiting them), it just doesn't feel
right that he's in this movie, often playing bit parts for the sake of it. It's not even an English thing. Jim Broadbent is here, and he's fine. You play a bumbler for so long and it's impossible to play a convincing cannibal, I guess.