Hugh Grant Surprises AFI Fest With Joke About 1995 Lewd Conduct Arrest at ‘Heretic’ Premiere

Hugh Grant spent less than a minute at the podium Thursday night to introduce his new film Heretic, but he made the most of 57 seconds in the spotlight.

The veteran movie star was welcomed to the microphone by his directors, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who explained the inspiration for their religious horror thriller about two young Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) forced to prove their faith when they knock on the wrong door and are greeted by a diabolical Mr. Reed (Grant), who taunts them in a game of cat and mouse. The filmmaking team first took turns honoring the occasion (AFI Fest) and the location (Hollywood’s iconic TCL Chinese Theatre).

“This movie theater is absolutely magical to us. I’m sure it is to many of you in the audience,” Beck said. “It’s a beautiful thing that there’s hundreds of us here, many of us are strangers, and yet it’s a rarity to be here together in an age where we could sit at home on our own personal devices. First and foremost, thank you so much for showing up for preserving the cinematic experience.”

Moments later, Woods lobbed a request. “Mr. Hugh Grant, will you just say a few words please?”

Grant obliged and offered only a handful, though enough to have the crowd in stitches. “I have nothing interesting to add to that except that it is very nice to be here,” the 64-year-old star said. “Hollywood Boulevard has always been a lucky place for me.”

The surprising quip caused Woods to double over with laughter and the rest of the Heretic team to applaud along with almost the entirety of the audience. Grant’s statement was an obvious reference to his 1995 arrest for lewd conduct with sex worker Estella Marie Thompson, aka Divine Brown. It’s been nearly 30 years, so it’s easy to forgive Grant for having a fuzzy memory as he was actually arrested two blocks to the south on Sunset Boulevard at 1:30 a.m. on June 27, 1995, when police officers caught him allegedly receiving oral sex in his white BMW.

“It’s nice of AFI to have us. It’s nice of you to show up. It was nice of these girls to be so brilliant in the film. It was nice of these two weirdos to put me in it and nice of the producers to pay me so little,” he said of the A24 release, drawing laughs once again. “I hope you enjoy it.”

Judging by the audience response, it seems they did. But back to the arrest. It’s not the first time Grant has talked about the career-shifting incident that shocked Hollywood at the time and resulted in a tidal wave of tabloid attention. Last spring, during an appearance on The View, he brought it up after host Sunny Hostin asked why he had emerged as a vocal critic of the British tabloids and the practice of invading people’s privacy.

“Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, well he’s just bitter because he got arrested with a hooker in 1995.’ But actually it had nothing to do with that because that was never uncovered by tabloids. It was that the bloody police gave everyone the information. It was nothing to do with that,” he explained, later citing “with power comes responsibility” in fighting against the tabloids’ questionable methods.

Coincidentally, the latter line is a piece of dialogue in Heretic that one of the young women connects to Spider-Man while Grant’s Mr. Reed corrects her to say it actually belongs to French author Voltaire.

Speaking of the film, during their remarks, the Iowa-born and bred filmmakers talked about how their homeland inspired the script. “Brian and I, we’ve known each other since we were 11 years old. We grew up in Iowa, started making movies back there in the Midwest,” explained the writer-director. “Over the last few decades, we’ve just had countless conversations about religion and about cult and this fear that we have, that I think many people share about what happens after you die.”

Beck continued: “A few years ago after we wrote A Quiet Place, which was a movie that generated tension through cinematic techniques, we wondered could we actually do the opposite, where the horror doesn’t necessarily get generated through monsters’ jump scares, but rather through ideas and discussion? That really was the birthplace for this idea of Heretic.”

Woods said that when growing up in Iowa, the one topic of discussion that’s off limits at the dinner table is religion. “That was something we grew up hearing all the time. Whatever you do, do not talk about religion because religion is divisive and it’s deeply personal. A conversation about religion really only leads to argument or bloodshed. So, we wanted to make a movie about that, and this is a wonderful place to screen a cinematic conversation about religion. Every single movie lover in this audience tonight knows that seeing a movie at the Chinese Theater is like going to church. You are in a congregation with strangers. It might be thrilling, you might be a little bored, but no matter what, it will be a religious experience.”

The experience will be open to the general public when Heretic opens Nov. 8.