New Delhi, Dec. 7 -- Perhaps we love villains the way we do because people are inherently evil, Hollywood star Hugh Grant said, with a twinkle and a grin, speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Saturday. It seemed a fitting combination of the two Grants the world has come to know. The actor who redefined the romcom hero as an awkward-witty-messy Everyman in movies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003) has spent the past decade in a sort of villain era, featuring rather malevolently in films such as Paddington 2 (2017), The Gentlemen (2019) and the twisted psychological thriller Heretic (2024), and indulging his love for the "weird" in roles such as that of the unforgettable Oompa-Loompa in Wonka (2023). "The interesting question to me has always been why audiences prefer the baddie and always have done," said Grant, 65. "I can only guess that it's because we are innately evil. and there is a sort of recognition that our positive characteristics, our niceness, our kindness, is just stuff we plaster on top to make life bearable." In conversation with actor Rahul Khanna, Grant also talked about his possible Indian roots (his father was born in the subcontinent); how his hotel room was full of shawls and bangles he had haggled over in a local Delhi market the previous day; and, interestingly, how much he disliked what technology had done to the idea of a shared movie-watching experience. "I think it's sad that everyone sits at home or watches a film on their iPhone," he said. "I was reading the news in the wonderful Hindustan Times this morning about Netflix buying Warner Brothers. For those of us who love the theatrical experience of film, that's another piece of bad news, I think. My hope in all things is that we'll get bored of the digital experience, soon, and go back to real-life experiences." In response to a question on the theme of Hindi-cinema roles, Grant said that he would like to feature in a Bollywood film. "I love song and dance now (the "now" being a reference to how famously miserable he was, rehearsing for and performing the dance sequence in Love Actually). When song and dance are done right, it's just blissful." The British star spoke of his long-standing connection with India. His father, James Grant, a soldier, was born "in what is now either India or Pakistan. which in a way makes me either half-Indian or half-Pakistani by birth." One of Hugh Grant's earliest films, Maurice (1987), was an Ismail Merchant-James Ivory production. He also spent weeks in 1980s Kolkata, shooting for La Nuit Bengali (The Bengali Night; 1988), directed by Nicolas Klotz and co-starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Supriya Pathak and Shabana Azmi. "I sort of got swept up with the Calcutta high society then - going to cocktail parties, playing polo and meeting people like actor Moon Moon Sen. I didn't know that life still existed anywhere. but it did exist in the Calcutta of the time," he said. This time, he opted for a very different route. He chose before his appearance at the summit to go shopping in a local market, and attend a tarot-card-reading session. "I asked the tarot reader to read my wife's fortune (Grant's wife is the TV producer Anna Elisabet Eberstein) and she was uncannily accurate, about who she was and what my children were like. We're slightly obsessed with her. We're thinking of going back to her for more on our future. She is my new guru," he said. Back to his recent roles, what is it that helps him get into the skin of the strange, twisted characters he's been playing? The key, he said, is to not play into the badness. The key is "to love them; to find the quivering jelly, the heart of them. And to find their history - what happened to make them that way? And then to play it as someone real who has no idea that they're bad," Grant said. He has enjoyed not merely improvising but "really fleshing out" some of his recent characters, he added, altering them significantly in some cases. To be able to do this, he has evolved a method that involves sketching out detailed biographies of each one, and "marinating" in the details. In front of the camera, though, the key is to be spontaneous. "Never ever do what you prepared in front of the bathroom mirror." Up next for him are a possible book or screenplay, Grant said. "As an actor, ultimately, you're saying someone else's lines. I've always felt I wanted to do more than that."...