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18.10.2024 03:33

Автор: Dimitriy
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Massive influx of shadowy get-out-the-vote spending floods swing states

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Volunteer Justin Berkheimer speaks to an Erie resident while knocking on doors in support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Erie, Pa., on Sept. 25. (Hannah Beier/Reuters)

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has offered Americans $47 for each swing state voter they recruit to his effort to elect Donald Trump.
Democratic groups have started paying at least $160 to more than 75,000 voters who agree to contact dozens of their friends and relatives with requests to support Kamala Harris.
In Philadelphia, a nonprofit plans to mail 102,000 copies of a comic book this weekend to every voter under the age of 32, featuring the Liberty Knights, a superhero squad that defeats Dr. Mayhem’s quest to steal the city’s spirit, entomb it in ruby shards and stop the youth from voting.
For those who would still rather party than do politics, there are free concerts, street festivals, coat drives, tailgates and daytime raves popping up near early voting centers in key states that blur the difference. Other operations are hiring thousands of people and organizing many more volunteers to knock on doors, place phone calls and share social media about how to vote.
None of these get-out-the-vote efforts are the work of the presidential campaigns or political parties. They belong instead to a vast, shadow machinery built by partisans often under nonpartisan banners to provide the final nudge that delivers the White House by mobilizing unlikely voters in about seven states. Funded largely without public disclosure, through local outfits and national networks, most of the operations have been lying in wait for years in preparation for this moment.
“We are registering tens of thousands of voters, signing up tens of thousands to vote by mail, and we are maximizing early vote,” said Kevin Mack, whose tax-deductible nonprofit, the Voter Project, created the comic book and has tried to juice voting by giving away $1,000 Target gift cards, $2,000 rent checks and $10,000 grants to community groups around the Democratic-heavy neighborhoods of Philadelphia. “At the end of the day, the combined efforts will increase youth turnout in Pennsylvania by over 100,000 people.”
There is no centralized way to know how much money they will spend or just how many people they will reach. Many of the national groups refuse to disclose their budgets, while hundreds of local groups fly entirely under the national radar, funded through tax classifications that will not report their income until next year and will never disclose their donors.
But people involved expect independent field and mobilization machines to easily be measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the razor thin margins dividing Trump and Harris in the target states, they could easily prove decisive in one or more states.
“Groups like ours grew over time to become these behemoths because we could do this cheaper and more efficiently than a campaign,” said Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which he says has deployed about 4,000 part-time paid staff and many more volunteers in the battlegrounds with the goal of knocking 10 million doors, including repeat visits. “A presidential campaign stands up in 12 to 15 months, and building this takes much longer than that to do right.”

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Competing campaign signs outside Johnny Mercer Theatre in Savannah, Ga., on Sept. 24. (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

On the left, a long-standing national network, America Votes, has a goal of knocking on doors in the seven states more than 30 million times this year. Organizers say their focus is on about 2.5 million suspected Democratic-leaning voters who started voting in federal elections after Trump’s 2016 victory. The field operation is done in partnership with dozens of other groups — including BlackPAC, Somos PAC and the Unite Here union — and includes tens of millions of dollars transferred from Future Forward, the largest independent advertising operation supporting Harris.
One of their partners, the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, which is focused on supporting Harris and expanding the federal social safety net, is budgeted at $40 million with a focus on eight states, including four of the core presidential battlegrounds, according to a briefing document obtained by The Washington Post. They claim to have already deployed more than 4,200 paid canvassers to knock on more than 3 million doors and make contact with more than 150,000 voters.
“With Trump on the ballot, we assume there will be another huge turnout from Trump’s base. Winning these battleground states means a Blue Surge matching the MAGA Surge’s turnout,” said Greg Speed, America Votes’ president, in a statement. “In a numbers game, there are more of us than them, but mobilizing our young and diverse coalition requires a massive mobilization not only online, but especially on the doors to break through the noise and get out the vote.”
That numbers game has become an obsession in the closing weeks of the campaign, as more money is pushed into a smaller battlefield than any recent presidential contest, largely because Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District have become less competitive. All told, the seven primary states in play — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina — cast 31 million votes in 2020, or 20 percent of the ballots nationwide.
But the share of voters still undecided in those places — not knowing whether to vote or whom to vote for — is just a fraction of that group, dominated by people who are disconnected from mainstream political conversations. The least attentive now find themselves the targets of an avalanche of political spending, invading their phones, infiltrating their friend networks, knocking on their doors and showing up in advertising where they consume media.
“We are talking about maybe 5 million human beings out of 42 million who are registered in seven battleground states,” said Dmitri Melhorn, a Democratic strategist at Oakland Corps who has worked to develop the outside infrastructure on the left. “You are talking about one out of eight or one out of nine people. You are talking about people who are different in how they consume politics.”
No single independent group compares to the size of the two major-party campaigns and their affiliated national and state parties, which have all begun to ramp up operations.
The coordinated Harris campaign boasts 2,500 staff and 353 offices in the seven targeted states, while the smaller Trump operation claims more than 300 offices for “hundreds of staff.” Both have been deploying small armies of weekend volunteers — the Harris campaign said it knocked on 800,000 doors and made more than 10 million calls last weekend — though the campaigns have been selective in the numbers they release. The Trump campaign has an elaborate system for rewarding about 40,000 trained “super volunteers,” who can earn a special hat, apparel and other memorabilia if they hit certain benchmarks of voter contact.
But neither campaign has designed their program to work in isolation. Both are counting on their independent allies to fill in gaps and multiply their efforts.
“It is very much the field goal unit, and here we are in the fourth quarter,” said Donald P. Green, a political scientist who studies voting behavior at Columbia University. “Polls tend to report likely voters. Turnout efforts tend to target unlikely voters, and of course a few percentage points could turn any of the seven contested states.”

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A drawing on the wall of the Erie County Harris campaign headquarters on Sept. 25 depicts how many doors have been knocked on in Erie, Pa. (Hannah Beier/Reuters)

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon released a list of voter mobilization organizations in September that she said “will play a critical role” in the campaign’s success, in a clear signal to donors interested in writing unlimited checks. They included America Votes, SOMOS, BlackPAC and Galvanize, a group that targets White women.
Another group on O’Malley Dillon’s list, the Strategic Victory Fund, is funding an organization called ProgressNow that has announced $60 million in spending across 10 states, including the seven battlegrounds, with the goal of creating “a surround sound environment” for targeted voters through digital ads, organic viral posts and other social media, said Anna Scholl, ProgressNow’s president.
The group has 90 paid organizers and more than 20,000 volunteers creating and sharing content. Some of the most successful pieces of content, including messaging about getting to the polls, have involved digital ads meant to look like horoscope readings or viral ASMR, a whispered type of video meant to give listeners tingling feelings.
“It’s one of those things that you look at and say I don’t know entirely why that works, but it does,” said Scholl.
Two other Democratic-leaning efforts, Relentless and the Empower Project, have been recruiting tens of thousands of lower propensity voters in Democratic-leaning communities across the battlegrounds to work as paid relational organizers. For a few hours’ work, more than 75,000 people will make real money calling, texting, emailing or posting in the social feeds of their friends and family with messages to support Harris and urge people to get to the polls.
“You can see 100 TV ads about how great a movie is, but if your best friend tells you it’s horrible, you believe them. We believe the same thing is true in politics,” said Mike Pfohl, Empower Project’s president, who expects to hire more than 40,000 “mobilizers” to reach 10 million voters across 10 states, including the seven battlegrounds, through the effort.
Relentless is active in five of the presidential battlegrounds states with a target of 35,000 paid communicators. They offer $160 for a few hours’ work, and then $40 more if they do more texting and calling on Election Day, when data will be updated to make clear who has still not voted.
“What we look for in a participant is someone who is a low-turnout voter but interested in getting involved this year,” said Davis Leonard, the chief executive officer of Relentless, an effort funded by the Progressive Turnout Project. “Their sphere of influence is bigger than they think.”
The Trump campaign has boasted about its recent partnerships with multiple outside efforts, including relative newcomers to the field organizing space: Turning Point USA and Musk’s America PAC, a group that has been sending canvassers, mail and text messages into swing states, spending more than $87 million in recent months. (Musk has donated nearly $75 million to the group through late September, about 90 percent of the money raised, according to federal filings.) Both groups have struggled in recent weeks as they have tried to rapidly scale up their operations, with Turning Point recently merging its operations in Wisconsin with America PAC.
Outside groups on the right have also so far dominated the postal get-out-the-vote or early-vote efforts, according to the tracking firm Mintt. Two-thirds of such mail has come from outside groups, and eight of the top 10 organizations sending mail with those messages are Republican, including America PAC, the National Sports Shooting Foundation, a gun manufacturer trade group, and Women Speak Out Fund, an affiliate of SBA Pro-Life America.

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Alysia McMillan holds campaign information as she canvasses for Elon Musk’s America PAC on Oct. 13 in Dalton, Ga. (Elijah Nouvelage/For The Washington Post)

Women Speak Out has announced plans to reach 10 million persuadable and low-turnout voters in the 2024 cycle. The National Sports Shooting Foundation effort, which is focused on driving registration and turnout among gun owners, does not endorse any candidate but has tried to highlight the contrast in the presidential contest between Trump and Harris, said Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the group. “We think she has made her position on gun rights pretty clear,” he said.
Groups that benefit Democrats, meanwhile, have been dominating another category of outside spending: free giveaways and party promotion to make voting feel fun.
The Detroit Pistons in partnership with Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan nonprofit that holds events largely in Democratic areas, will hold a downtown Detroit “tip off early voting” event on Saturday called “Pistonsland,” with carnival rides, food and performances by hip-hop artists Lil Baby, Tay B and Skilla Baby. Other “Vote City” events have been planned for Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Rock the Vote has also partnered with the WNBA and the NFL on voter education and mobilization efforts.
“Teaming up with musicians and sports teams for these on-the-ground activations enable us to reduce barriers and create opportunities to participate,” said Carolyn Dewitt, Rock the Vote’s president, in a statement.
Daybreaker, a daytime party promoter championed by Democratic donor advisers, has a packed schedule of officially nonpartisan midday dance parties planned for cities across the battleground map over the coming weeks to promote voting and registration. One Detroit event in New Center Park is promoted as featuring both “pole dancers” and “poll dancers” — and free breakfast.
“We’re bringing the collective joy back to collective action — So dress in purple — and let’s party to the polls!” announce the promotions for the events, which include stops in places like Las Vegas; Flagstaff and Phoenix in Arizona; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Kenosha and Green Bay in Wisconsin.
In major cities, the Harris campaign has begun paying for weekend street festivals near early-voting centers, but their effort joins other groups that have already been in the communities for a while. One group called ShowUpStrong24 has been holding neighborhood events for months around voter registration in Philadelphia, a program that is now shifting to early-vote activation.
Christian Leonzo Vargas, a marketing consultant who has been leading many of the efforts, has organized coat giveaways, rent check giveaways, free “brews and ballots” events at a local brewery and backpack giveaways in recent months. This week he will hold a silent journaling event in one neighborhood, followed by a walk to an early-voting place with headphones that allow everyone who gathers to listen to the same songs.
One recent sweepstakes organized on social media gave away two $1,000 Target shopping sprees. Participants had to check their voting registration online, resulting in more than 1,000 new voting registrations, Vargas said. He said the offer of help for people struggling makes the conversation about voting easier.
“We went into low-propensity neighborhoods at their low-propensity apartment complexes,” Vargas said about the back-to-school giveaway that distributed 1,500 backpacks. “One of the things the community members said was, ‘Thank you for helping us before asking for something.’”
ShowUpStrong24 and the Voter Project are fully tax-deductible, nonpartisan nonprofits that do not expressly show support for any party or candidate. Like dozens of other similar groups that could impact the result next month, they will never have to disclose either their donors or how much they spent on all the free stuff they gave away.
Other efforts are far more conventional. On an early Thursday in Detroit, at a job site at the Gordie Howe bridge, volunteers for the AFL-CIO union members handed out fliers on one side explaining Harris’s role in casting the tiebreaking vote for the American Rescue Plan, which shored up pension plans, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which lowered prescription drug prices. On the other side of the flier, the union warned of Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy plan for Trump that the nominee himself has largely disavowed.
Kecia Harper, an operating foreperson and union member, said some of the other workers have said they are swayed to vote for Trump. But she wanted them to know that she thought Trump was distracting them with misinformation about immigration from the real issues that affect working people.
“He does the whole, ‘Get everyone over here talking about the dogs and the cats,’ instead of talking about the real things,” Harper said.

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There’s more to the Brothers Grimm than princesses and witches

On any list of the world’s most translated books, you are likely to find the Bible, “The Communist Manifesto” — and a collection of stories featuring witches, talking animals, goose girls and ogres, as well as a fish that grants wishes and a frog that turns into a handsome young man.
Sound familiar? Here’s how its first story begins: “Once upon a time, when wishes still came true, there lived a king who had beautiful daughters. The youngest was so lovely that even the sun, which had seen so many things, was filled with wonder when it shone upon her face.”
“The Frog King or Iron Heinrich,” quoted here in Maria Tatar’s English version, appears in “Kinder und Hausmarchen,” sometimes translated as “Children’s and Household Tales,” but universally referred to as simply “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” Few books have given more pleasure or done as much to shape our imaginations.

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Yet as Ann Schmiesing, a professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, makes clear in her new biography, “The Brothers Grimm,” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were far more than just compilers of fairy tales. They were, above all, scholars and celebrants of medieval German language and culture. During their lives, whether working together or separately, they edited the epic “Nibelungenlied,” produced an 1,100-page “German Grammar,” compiled a four-volume survey of Teutonic mythology, outlined the phonological shift among Indo-European languages known as “Grimm’s law” — it explains how the Latin “pater” becomes the German “Vater” and English “father” — and spent their last years on a multivolume historical dictionary of the German language. They got only up to the letter E, but other lexicographers finished the job, even though it took — this sounds like a fairy tale — more than a hundred years.
In general, much of the Grimms’ scholarship might be described as nationalist antiquarianism, promulgating a romanticized vision of the German past as natural, innocent and authentic. A return to true Germanness, they believed, could counter the dominant French culture of the time, which they regarded as artificial, sophisticated and fundamentally shallow. Bear in mind that the brothers passed the first half of their lives under the shadow of Napoleon, whose conquests were imposing French laws and manners on half of Europe.

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Born in Hanau, in the electorate of Hessen-Kassel, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) were the two oldest children in a close-knit family. Their childhood was idyllic, even privileged, but when their father, a high-ranking administrator in the government, died at an early age, the two brothers became the breadwinners for their mother and four younger siblings. Eventually, both managed to earn law degrees at the University of Marburg, though even then scholarly research was their passion. Jacob focused mainly on philology, while Wilhelm wrote frequently about medieval literature.
Through friendship with Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, who had together compiled a famous 1805 collection of German folk songs and ballads, “The Boy’s Magic Horn” (“Des Knaben Wunderhorn”), the brothers began to collect traditional stories, those they thought reached back into early German history and were somehow characteristic of its Volk, or people.
As Schmiesing emphasizes, they didn’t scour the countryside for peasants with tales to tell, as is still commonly believed. In fact, they heard many of the stories from educated young women in their own social circle. For instance, Henriette Dorothea Wild — whom Wilhelm would eventually marry — is the likely source for “Hansel and Gretel.” Presumably, she and other informants had learned these tales from their nursemaids or servants, while some may even have been adapted from printed books. In the second edition of “Children’s and Household Tales,” the Grimms mentioned a tailor’s widow named Dorothea Viehmann, who related as many as 40 of the 211 stories they would ultimately publish. Yet two of the most powerful were given to them by the painter Philipp Otto Runge: “The Fisherman and His Wife” — my own favorite, by the way — and the eerie and shocking “The Juniper Tree.”
First published in 1812 when the Grimms were in their late 20s, “Children’s and Household Tales” was initially presented as mainly a scholarly project, complete with voluminous research notes. Over time, though, Wilhelm enhanced and shaped the stories and their narration to make them more appealing to parents and children. Nonetheless, all the way up to the seventh edition of 1857, the last issued during their lifetimes, the Grimms maintained that they were always faithful to the words of their informants and that in all fundamentals the tales were genuine, orally transmitted relics of ancient times. Today we recognize that these fairy tales are part of the world’s ocean of story and that variants of “Cinderella” or “The Sleeping Beauty” can be found in numerous cultures. The brothers were aware that the Countess d’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault had spearheaded a vogue for fairy tales in late-17th and early-18th-century France.
Setting aside questions of historicity and accuracy of transcription, it’s nonetheless clear that Wilhelm pretty much established the strangely flat tone and unflappable, dreamlike narration, in effect the transcendental timelessness, that we associate with fairy tales. No one in these stories is ever surprised by the most extraordinary occurrences. The characters are one-dimensional: Princesses prove largely interchangeable, and one wicked stepmother is much like another. Nonetheless, this simplicity and terseness only enhance their hypnotic, archetypal power. Start reading or listening to any of the greatest stories, and it’s hard to stop until you reach “And they lived happily ever after” or its analogue.
In recent years, the Grimms and the fairy tales have been closely and critically reexamined. Schmiesing’s biography doesn’t shy away from pointing out strains of racism, misogyny, sexism and antisemitism in the brothers themselves, especially Jacob, and in their writing. For instance, obedience, piety and self-sacrifice in the stories are virtues typically associated with women, while heroes get to be cheeky and daring. Moreover, the Grimms’ tales, like Wagner’s operas, were readily co-opted by Nazi Germany as emblematically Aryan.
In the end, though, there’s one immense challenge facing any biographer of the Brothers Grimm: Jacob and Wilhelm lived through tumultuous times, but their own lives were remarkably dull and relatively void of incident. They hated to be separated from each other, and Jacob, essentially solitary by nature, found that residing with Wilhelm’s family provided all the society he needed. Mainly, the two brothers just wanted to get on with their research.
Consequently, to make up for this paucity of striking biographical detail, Schmiesing proffers careful descriptions of the brothers’ research, while also tracking the multiple ways the politics of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic eras affected Jacob’s and Wilhelm’s careers. Admittedly, some of this contextual material risks seeming dry or excessive to those readers primarily interested in the background to one of the world’s most influential books.
To my own mind, besides populating our imaginations with immortal characters and the plot arcs of much of our fiction and drama, the Grimms’ fairy tales also impart two important life lessons: True heroes and heroines typically exhibit high spirits, and, with a few exceptions, kindness to animals always brings unexpected rewards.
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Is Hugh Grant’s Most Convincing Character ‘Hugh Grant’?

“I used to do interviews where I was Mr. Stuttery Blinky, and it’s my fault that I was then shoved into a box marked ‘Mr. Stuttery Blinky,’” Hugh Grant said.

Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” established him as a quintessentially British romantic hero of winning charm and diffidence. But his recent run of strange and sometimes creepy characters plays so effectively against type that you begin to suspect you were mistaken about his type all along.
He would be the first to say that something darker and more complicated lurks beneath his easy surface.
“At school I had a teacher who used to take me aside and say, ‘Who is the real Hugh Grant? Because I think the one we’re seeing might be insincere,’” Grant said as he strolled through Central Park last month. He was comparing himself — or at least his powers of persuasion — to Mr. Reed, the charismatically articulate villain he plays in “Heretic,” a religious-horror movie due in theaters on Nov. 8. “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce — I might be guilty of that.”
At 64, Grant is enjoying what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career, playing an unlikely rogue’s gallery of suave miscreants (“The Undoing,” “A Very English Scandal”), seedy gangsters (“The Gentlemen”), power-hungry tricksters (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”) and self-deluded thespians (“Paddington 2” and “Unfrosted”), not to mention the bumptious little Oompa-Loompa in “Wonka.” That abashed, floppy-haired, benign early version of himself — that was never who he was anyway, he says.
“My mistake was that I suddenly got this massive success with ‘Four Weddings’ and I thought, ah, well, if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too,” he said. “So I used to do interviews where I was Mr. Stuttery Blinky, and it’s my fault that I was then shoved into a box marked ‘Mr. Stuttery Blinky.’ And people were, quite rightly, repelled by it in the end.”
Grant had just come from Toronto, where “Heretic” had its premiere. In New York it was a blazingly beautiful day, and he greeted the park like an old friend, passing some of his favorite landmarks: the Delacorte Clock, whose bronze animals were doing their delightful dance to music to mark the hour, and the statue of Balto, the heroic medicine-transporting Siberian husky posing imperiously on his rock not far from the children’s zoo.
“Have you noticed that we’re being drawn irresistibly to Balto?” Grant asked, patting the statue. “Hi, Balto!” He added: “I’ve had an experience with some huskies before.”
He mentioned one of his first roles, in a 1985 mini-series about Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition in 1911. “I played a rather pathetic scientist whose name, appropriately enough, was Cherry-Garrard,” Grant said. He was required to mush a team of huskies across the snow.

“He may feign disinterest in the profession and downplay his own abilities, but he’s a great talent who works bloody hard on set,” said Hugh Bonneville, a frequent co-star of Grant’s.

“I said, ‘Go forward’ in Inuit, but those bastard dogs turned 180 degrees around and dragged me away onto the ice,” he said. “They were just laughing at me.”

IT MIGHT SEEM ODD to cast Grant, with his British facility for telling droll anecdotes against himself, in a horror film. Among other things, he is terrified of them and recently walked out of one at a multiplex he had wandered into by mistake with his brother, a banker who lives in New York. (Don’t get him started on “Midsommar.”)
But Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed “Heretic,” said in a joint video interview that Grant’s ability to subvert expectation made him perfect for the part.
“This is an actor who is revolutionizing what his career was known for — and revamping it and turning it against his audience,” Beck said.
The pair, whose writing credits include “A Quiet Place,” recalled seeing Grant in the 2012 movie “Cloud Atlas,” in which he plays six characters, all despicable.
“The first thing out of Scott’s mouth when we came out of the movie was, ‘Hugh Grant,’” Woods said. “We got so excited about the challenging, bold and weird choice of him being in that movie. And in the next 10 years, for our money he became the best character actor around to play edgy, dark characters.”
Grant, whose youthful handsomeness has given way to a distinguished rumpledness, was a recognizable figure in the park. While most pedestrians affected a cool New York distance even as they clocked his presence, there were a few shouts of “I love you, Hugh!” At one point a woman approached, babbling about her obsession with “About a Boy” (2002), in which Grant plays a roguish bachelor who embraces the responsibilities of human connection and succumbs to monogamy. (There are definitely parts of himself in that character, said Grant, who — after years of enthusiastic single-dom and high-profile girlfriends like Elizabeth Hurley and Jemima Khan — finally married six years ago.)

Grant is enjoying what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career, playing murderers and miscreants like Mr. Reed in “Heretic.”Credit...Kimberley French/A24

“I know that movie word for word,” the woman said. She gestured vaguely toward her husband, who was tending to their baby and looking like he dearly wished to be somewhere else. “I literally make him watch it about once a year.”
“You’re very nice,” Grant said. (“Poor man,” he added, after they’d gone.)
Grant grew up in what he called “genteel poverty” in London, where his father worked in the carpet business. He won a scholarship to Oxford, then fell by chance, at least in his telling, into acting. He has always exuded ambivalence about the job, wistfully mentioning his half-written novel and grumbling about whether he even likes the profession. “I realize it’s not a good look,” he said, laughing.
He doesn’t love the Hollywood machine. Though he is reliably hilarious in interviews (and delightfully raunchy on British TV), his ironic wit and curmudgeonly affectations can land him in trouble. After a stream of anodyne enthusiasm from his fellow “Wonka” actors in a news conference last year, Grant mixed it up by declaring that “I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.” (Taken out of context, that sounds terrible. But that sort of humor is normal in Britain; just watch the Richard Curtis movies starring Grant: “Four Weddings,” “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually.”)
“One confusing thing about him is that you don’t know what he’s serious about,” said Chloe East, who plays one of two young Mormon missionaries in “Heretic,” which was filmed in Vancouver. “He’s very British. You would say, ‘How is your weekend?’ and he would say, ‘It was terrible; I hate Vancouver.’ And you wonder, did he really have a dreadful weekend, or is that just his way of communicating?”
Grant takes his work, at least, utterly seriously. To prepare for roles, he writes out elaborate back stories for his characters and peppers directors with questions and notes in long email exchanges.
“He would send us three pages of, like, ‘I was thinking about Richard Dawkins, and what does this line mean, and this is how I would interpret it,’” Woods said. “We loved working with an actor who cared so much.”

“This is an actor who is revolutionizing what his career was known for — and revamping it and turning it against his audience,” Scott Beck, a director of “Heretic,” said.

Among other actors, he has a reputation for rigor.
“That whole ‘I don’t like acting and I wish I could be an accountant’ thing — that’s nonsense,” said the British actor Hugh Bonneville, a.k.a. Lord Grantham of “Downton Abbey,” who appeared with Grant in “Notting Hill” (1999) and again in “Paddington 2” (2018). “He may feign disinterest in the profession and downplay his own abilities, but he’s a great talent who works bloody hard on set.”
Bonneville recalled Grant’s bravura turn in the “Paddington 2” closing credits, a musical extravaganza that was shot on the first day of filming and features Grant dressed in a saucy outfit of bedazzled kick-flare pants. (He plays Phoenix Buchanan, a louche, self-regarding has-been actor in what is widely considered one of his finest roles.)
“It took a great deal of commitment — and it also established him as a wonderful song-and-dance man,” Bonneville said. Grant aficionados might recall the actor’s Wham!-esque fake music video in the 2007 rom-com “Music and Lyrics” and his little Oompa-Loompa dance in “Wonka.” In a particularly hair-raising moment in “Heretic,” he sings a snippet of Radiohead’s “Creep.”
His approach often includes ad-libs. The risqué lines uttered by his character, Daniel Cleaver, as he seduces Bridget (Renée Zellweger) in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001) — including his iconic “Hello, Mummy!” response to Bridget’s enormous underpants — were all Grant’s idea. (A fourth “Bridget Jones” film, in which Cleaver has moved on from “cruising around the Kings Road eyeing up young girls in short skirts,” as Grant put it, is to be released in February.)
There are definitely bits of Cleaver, the toxic but intoxicating boyfriend who drove everyone mad in their 20s, in Grant, too. Asked in a video interview which version was closer to reality — nice in-person Hugh or wicked onscreen Daniel — Zellweger laughed.
“Do we have to choose? Can’t we have them all?” she said. “There are so many Hughs, and your guess is as good as mine. Whichever one he wants to be.”

Grant with Renée Zellweger in “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” There were bits of him in the toxic but intoxicating Daniel Cleaver.

Another side of Grant comes from his persistent and, given the British media landscape, courageous campaigning role for Hacked Off, a group working to expose phone hacking and other illegal activities by the country’s tabloid newspapers.
In April, Grant, one of hundreds of public figures whose phones were hacked by the now-defunct News of the World, reluctantly settled a lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun. He had accused the company of hiring a private investigator to break into his house and bug him, among other things.
“I would love to see all the allegations that they deny tested in court,” he said on X. But under English law, if he won the case in court but was awarded damages that were “even a penny less than the settlement offer” put forward by the company, Grant would have had to pay both sides’ legal costs — upward of 10 million pounds.
“I’m afraid I am shying at that fence,” he said, adding that he planned to donate his settlement money to the anti-hacking campaign.

GRANT MAY SEEM RELAXED onscreen, but “it takes great skill to make it look that easy,” Bonneville said. In fact, Grant said, he’s often terrified of freezing up on set or of his self-consciousness overcoming his spontaneity. When he met East on the first day of filming “Heretic,” he confessed to being filled with anxiety about some of the dialogue-heavy scenes.
“In my head I was like, ‘You’re Hugh Grant, you’ve worked on a million trillion movies, and if anyone should be nervous it should be me,’” East said.
The scenes were endlessly workshopped and rehearsed in myriad ways, with Grant thinking through every action and intonation and inserting new snippets of movement, dialogue and even some strange little noises to break up the big blocks of talk.

“They have made me absurdly sentimental,” Grant said of his wife and children.

“It was really interesting watching him,” said Sophie Thatcher (“Yellowjackets”), who plays the other missionary. “This was a whole other level of preparation. He was so precise about finding little quirks to make his character feel just a little bit off.”
Forced to do publicity for their projects, many stars can seem utterly fascinated by the conversation during an interview (they are actors, after all), only to instantly glaze over if it turns to a topic other than themselves. Grant, by contrast, comes across as genuinely curious and engaged. Well-read, hyper-intelligent and amusingly snarky, he has a fine British ability to talk endlessly, and often not altogether seriously, about virtually anything.
We discussed, among other topics, religion and death and politics and euthanasia and Sept. 11 and New York City and whether we believed in the afterlife (probably not, though he said he once saw a ghost floating around in a castle in Yorkshire). We were just moving to the subject of smartphones, which Grant believes to be “the devil’s tinderbox,” when he spotted a lithe, dark-haired runner on a distant path in the park.
“Is that my wife?” he asked.
It wasn’t, though the wife in question, Anna Elisabet Eberstein, had traveled with him to New York and is indeed an avid runner. The two met at a bar in 2010. Grant, nearing 50, was still in his incorrigible-bachelor phase and had been “drunk for about three years,” he said; Eberstein, who is Swedish but was living in London, was mourning the end of her first marriage.
Their wedding took place eight years later. “I can’t believe she likes me,” Grant said. “But it’s a very happy marriage.”
As he talked about his wife and children — they have three together and he has two others from an earlier relationship with the actress Tinglan Hong — his tone softened and the irony fell away. “They have made me absurdly sentimental,” he said.
Teary, too.

Grant likened himself to his “Heretic” character in at least one way: “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce — I might be guilty of that.”Credit...Dana Scruggs for The New York Times

Grant cried when he saw “Finding Nemo.” He cries when he watches “The Sound of Music.” (“Every time I hear him talk about ‘The Sound of Music,’ I think that’s his Rosebud,” Beck said.) He cries while reading aloud children’s books, especially ones about animal parents and babies.
He mentioned a story about a middle-aged bachelor rabbit whose self-centered life gives way to “total chaos in his burrow” when some unruly ducklings move in. He finds that he loves them very much.
“Of course, that was the story of my life,” he said. “I was living on my road, playing golf, perfectly happy. And then my life was turned upside down.”
He paused. “Have you heard of ‘Stick Man’?” he added, referring to the Julia Donaldson picture book.
“He’s a stick,” he explained. “He has to go off and do something, and terrible things happen to him — dogs pick him up and people want to put him in the fire. And he keeps saying, ‘I’m not a stick, I’m Stick Man, and I have to get back to my children.’”
“Anyway, he does get back to them, and they’re very pleased to see him.”
Grant looked a little sheepish, but he also looked utterly sincere. “That always makes me cry,” he said.

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С сожалением и понятными пожеланиями, Dimitriy.