NEW YORK >> Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” established him as a 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’d be the first to say that something 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 recently. 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 now in theaters. “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.”

“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 miniseries 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.

“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 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.”

“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 and his wife, Anna Elisabet Eberstein, have three children together and he has two others from an earlier relationship with actress Tinglan Hong. As he discusses them his tone softened and the irony fell away.

“They have made me absurdly sentimental,” he said.

Grant cried when he saw “Finding Nemo.” He cries when he watches “The Sound of Music.” He cries while reading aloud children’s books, especially ones about animal parents and babies.

“Have you heard of ‘Stick Man’?” he said, 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.