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 during a recent interview. 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 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.” 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.”

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.

But Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed “Heretic,” said in a joint 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, 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.”)

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 British actor Hugh Bonneville, who appeared with Grant in “Notting Hill” (1999) and 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.

“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, will 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 which version was closer to reality — nice in- person Hugh or wicked on- screen 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 met his wife, Anna Elisabet Eberstein, 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 actor Tinglan Hong — his tone softened and the irony fell away. “They have made me absurdly sentimental,” he said.

Teary, too.

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 also utterly sincere. “That always makes me cry,” he said.