11 Safe Good Guy Actors Who Should Have Played More Villains
10. Hugh Grant
Went Bad In... Bridget Jones' Diary, Cloud Atlas Grant has played a villain a couple of times, most recently with his six roles in the mind-bending Cloud Atlas, and while the actor himself confessed himself unsure whether he would be able to pull that off, he showed greater form in those darker roles than he has recently in the kind of chintzy romantic guff he's been making otherwise for the past 20 years. Elsewhere, it is the dark charm of his Bridget Jones antagonist Daniel Cleaver (and the anti-hero bent of performances like About A Boy) that suggest we could have seen a lot more than the floppy-haired fop we've all grown accustomed to, and there's a very real sense that if someone other than Richard Curtis had helped launch the Englishman to the attention of the masses, we might have got a different Hugh Grant altogether. There's clearly a naughty side to the actor's persona - given his infamous run-in with the law - and the gleeful embrace of both his roles in Cloud Atlas and his Daniel Cleaver performance, and as Grant himself admitted, he used to play villains "quite a lot" before Four Weddings. Sadly, instead of seeing Grant building on his performances as killers and rapists in Cloud Atlas, next up we get to see him starring opposite Martin Lawrence in a comedy we can probably already write off.
Went Bad In... Bridget Jones' Diary, Cloud Atlas Grant has played a villain a couple of times, most recently with his six roles in the mind-bending Cloud Atlas, and while the actor himself confessed himself unsure whether he would be able to pull that off, he showed greater form in those darker roles than he has recently in the kind of chintzy romantic guff he's been making otherwise for the past 20 years. Elsewhere, it is the dark charm of his Bridget Jones antagonist Daniel Cleaver (and the anti-hero bent of performances like About A Boy) that suggest we could have seen a lot more than the floppy-haired fop we've all grown accustomed to, and there's a very real sense that if someone other than Richard Curtis had helped launch the Englishman to the attention of the masses, we might have got a different Hugh Grant altogether. There's clearly a naughty side to the actor's persona - given his infamous run-in with the law - and the gleeful embrace of both his roles in Cloud Atlas and his Daniel Cleaver performance, and as Grant himself admitted, he used to play villains "quite a lot" before Four Weddings. Sadly, instead of seeing Grant building on his performances as killers and rapists in Cloud Atlas, next up we get to see him starring opposite Martin Lawrence in a comedy we can probably already write off.