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

The veteran movie star was welcomed to the microphone by his directors, Scott Beck and Bryan Woodswho 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. in the cat and mouse game. The directing team first took their turn to honor the occasion (AFI Fest) and the location (the iconic TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood).

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

Moments later, Woods made a request. “Mr. Hugh Grant, would you just say a few words, please?

Grant obliged and only offered a hand, albeit enough to have the crowd in stitches. “I don’t have anything interesting to add to this except that it’s really nice to be here,” the 64-year-old star said. “Hollywood Boulevard has always been a lucky place for me.”

The surprising joke made Woods double over with laughter and the rest Heretical team to cheer along with almost the entire audience seated inside the Chinese. Grant’s statement was an obvious reference to his 1995 arrest for lascivious conduct with sex worker Estella Marie Thompson aka Divine Brown. It’s been almost 30 years, so it’s easy to forgive Grant for having a fuzzy memory, because he was actually arrested two blocks south on Sunset Boulevard at 1:30 a.m. on June 27 1995, when police officers caught him performing 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 bright 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 laughter once more. “I hope you like it.”

Judging by the public’s response, it looks like they did. But back to the arrest. It’s not the first time Grant has spoken out about the career-changing incident that shocked Hollywood at the time and led to a flurry of tabloid attention. Last spring, during an appearance on The View, he brought it up after host Sunny Hostin asked why he appeared as a vocal critic of British tabloids and the practice of invading people’s privacy.

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

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

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

Beck continued: A few years ago, after I wrote A quiet placewhich was a film that generated tension through cinematic techniques, we wondered if we could do it the other way around, where the horror isn’t necessarily generated through monster jump scares, but rather through ideas and discussions? This was really the birthplace for this idea of Heretical.”

Woods said that when he was growing up in Iowa, the only topic of discussion that was off-limits at the dinner table was religion. “It was something I grew up hearing all the time. Whatever you do, don’t talk about religion because religion is divisive and deeply personal. A conversation about religion really only leads to strife or bloodshed. So we wanted to make a film about it, and this is a great place to project a cinematic conversation about religion. Every movie lover in this audience tonight knows that seeing a movie at the Chinese Theater is like going to church. You are in a gathering with strangers. It might be thrilling, you might get a little bored, but whatever it is, it will be a religious experience.”

The experience will be open to the general public when Heretical opens on November 8.