The London Evening Standard – 20th March, 2014

Richard E Grant, the ‘perfumed ponce’ of cult film Withnail & I, is hot property: guest-starring in Girls and about to head forDownton. But somehow he’s found time to launch a unisexfragrance with notes of Camberwell carrot

‘Champagne breath is like a poodle’s arse. it is absolutely rank! And it looks so beautiful and bubbly’: Richard E Grant.

By Alex Clark

‘Oh my God!’ exclaims Richard E Grant, grasping my hand. ‘I just want to lick you! That makes me want to Lick. Your. Wrist. Oh, my God, that’s so good.’ Journalists are sleazy, and probably actors, too, but this encounter, which took place on a bright, sunshiny morning, is entirely innocent; Grant is merely being his irrepressibly exuberant self. After all, he tells me, ‘I have compulsively sniffed everything all my life, and I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t.’ But this is sniffing with a purpose. Grant has spritzed me with Jack, the unisex perfume that he has created from scratch, which will launch at the beginning of April in Liberty and online, and after a decent interval — ‘Let it waft a bit!’ — we’re seeing how the top notes of lime, mandarin and marijuana and the layers of frankincense, vetiver, white musk and tobacco beneath are faring against the unmistakable background of Radox shower gel. Quite well, apparently.

Would he say if they weren’t? Possibly, but in the most endearing way. It’s clear within two minutes of meeting him that Grant, currently guest-starring in Girls and a recent addition to the cast of Downton Abbey, is one of life’s enthusiasts, all twinkly eyes and Tiggerishness. He says he can’t believe he’s 56 and three-quarters, and neither can I. If he were a scent, you’d get hit by a sharp blast of fun, frivolity and flirtiness first and then begin to catch the bass notes of discernment and intelligence. In brief, naughty but nice.

And, it turns out, one of those eccentric, madcap, passion-pursuing, typically British-inventor types. Jack is not a celebrity fragrance. There is no picture of Grant on the bottle, no lucrative contract in the wings. He pooh-poohed his friend Anya Hindmarch’s suggestion that its name should be his initials, REG (too reminiscent of Reg Varney and of panto), although he waxes lyrical about her crucial role in kickstarting the whole enterprise. It all began when they were fellow house-guests on a Caribbean holiday a couple of years ago.

‘She saw me with my head in a gardenia bush, and she said, “Are you going to do something about that?” And I said, “What, do you mean psychiatrically?” She said, “No… I meant have you ever thought of making perfume?”?’ The answer was an emphatic yes. ‘It’s what I’ve always dreamed of doing.’ Grant grew up in Swaziland, the son of a politician, and in 2005 he made the film Wah-Wah about his childhood (starring Nicholas Hoult as his younger self), an experience he describes as ‘hands-down’ the best of his professional life. ‘When I was a kid in Swaziland,’ he tells me, ‘I tried to make perfume out of gardenia and rose petals, in boiled sugar water in jam jars, which I then buried in the garden. And a week later, when I opened them, the osmosis that I’d hoped would transform them into perfume… they turned out to be stink bombs.’

Hindmarch’s intervention might have ended there; back in London, Grant wondered whether it was one of those pipe-dream conversations crushed by the return to reality. But the handbag supremo had other ideas, sending him off to perfumer Lyn Harris of Miller Harris and reassuring him that the ‘bean-counters’ would do the numbers. The trail led to celebrated ‘nose’ Roja Dove, who blind-tested him through ‘a paintbox display of every oil and scent possible’. Dove’s verdict was that Grant, possibly because he’s never drunk or smoked, was in possession of ‘a very sharp nose’.

Numerous other encounters ensued, including a ‘pube-straighteningly clear’ conversation with a no-nonsense industry expert who told him she’d only agreed to help him because ‘you turned up on time, didn’t send an assistant and didn’t want your name or face on the box’, but who changed the game by hooking him up with department store Liberty. The store agreed ‘within five minutes’ to stock the (then nameless) perfume on a year-long exclusive deal and to allow him to sell it via his website. He came out of the meeting and ‘literally jumped up and down. It felt like we were in Dragons’ Den!’

Next stop was Parisian perfumer Aliénor Massenet. ‘What was extraordinary was that having thought that nobody would take me seriously because I was a complete amateur, she did. And she said, “You have enormous passion for this,” so it was wonderful. It was like having access to a door that I’d never had open to me before in my life.’

There were, naturally, setbacks. Once the name had been settled — an homage to Grant’s lifelong love of the Union Jack — there was a legal tussle with a US company (‘I can’t say who’) who thought the name was too similar to one of its products; at the last minute the company withdrew, but fending it off had cost a fair few bob. He has funded the whole shebang himself, prepared to write off a minimum production run of 3,000 bottles in the worst-case scenario, and benefiting from some ‘staggering generosity’.

It is, nonetheless, an unexpected direction for an actor — particularly one so prolific, so apparently committed to maintaining a steady stream of work. Ironically enough, Grant’s career was launched when he starred as an actor who couldn’t even get an audition, let alone a part, in Bruce Robinson’s 1987 film Withnail & I. As so often, however, overnight success looks simpler in hindsight. At the time, ‘they said the title was unpronounceable,’ he recalls now. ‘It had no women in it, no car chases, no Crocodile Dundee, which was the big hit of that year, nobody that anybody had heard of and no plot.’ After four weeks at the Odeon Haymarket, it shuffled off, but video and DVD releases made it a student cult (I should know: I was in its generational sweet spot, and still occasionally shout, ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake,’ or call for ‘the finest wines available to humanity’) and, over time, an acknowledged great of British film-making. Grant’s electrically manic, comically menacing performance — in a role turned down by Daniel Day-Lewis — is mesmerising, unforgettable. ‘It gave me my entire career,’ he says simply. ‘I owe everything to it and to Bruce Robinson.’

Ten years later, he appeared in Spice World: The Spice Girls Movie, to please his young daughter Olivia. He got plenty of flak in serious thespian circles: ‘But my playground credibility the two terms after the movie came out was at an all-time high.’ He had a whale of a time: ‘I loved them; they were just hilarious, completely undisciplined and out of control, and because they weren’t actors, and because they were such good friends, there was no hierarchy. Normal rules of film-making didn’t apply to them. It was like a holiday job.’

And it was partly to delight Olivia, now 25, that he joined the cast of Girls as drug addict Jasper, who falls into a dangerous liaison with Jessa (Jemima Kirke) when they’re both in rehab. ‘It was so thrilling to work with all of them, God, absolutely, I just loved it! Lena Dunham, she’s an extraordinary multi-hyphenate talent, a producer, writer, director, actor — and all-round good mensch in the middle of all that. And 27 years old! You just can’t believe that she’s done it.’

One scene has Jasper in conversation with Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet). He’s off his head on coke, she’s merely talking at her normal speed. ‘I learned those lines — it was only a page of script — literally day in, day out, for a week beforehand in order to get as fast as I possibly could. And then somebody said, “It’s so fast it’s incomprehensible,” and I said, “Well, at least it’s faster than Zosia.”?’

He’s done four episodes and, because his character wasn’t killed off, he hopes he might be asked back. So, I double-check, it was a totally positive experience? ‘I’m afraid so. I can only blow smoke up that wigwam.’

And now to Downton, a show that many, especially in America, assumed he would have been called up for earlier, given his below-stairs turn in Julian Fellowes’ Gosford Park. He plays art historian Simon Bricker, and it’s already brought one welcome perk: ‘My mother kept banging on and saying, “When are you going to be in Downton Abbey?”, as though that was the only thing. It shows in Africa, where she lives, so I Skyped her a couple of weeks ago and said, “I am now in Downton Abbey,” and she was enormously relieved; she could go and tell her fellow bridge players that her son had finally cracked it.’

Is it fun? ‘It is, yes. And I know other actors in it. But it is slightly the problem of being the new bug going in, because they’ve all been doing it for four years. So you go in as the outsider and hope that you’re not going to be flayed alive.’ That’s unlikely, surely? ‘Well, no, it can happen.’ Has it happened to him? ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ Has he done it to anyone else? ‘No. Cruelty’s something I run away from, rather than towards.’

That rings entirely true, despite his air of merry mischief. Grant’s obvious appetite and relish for the world suggests an underlying generosity. It surfaces when I ask him how the Union Jack iconography he’s drawn to relates to his terribly British persona and, in turn, to his expat upbringing in Swaziland. ‘There was Marxist Mozambique across one border,’ he explains, ‘and fascist apartheid on the other, and for me, the Union Jack and British culture and the British way of life are so emblematic of free speech, freedom of expression and a sense of everybody being welcome underneath the banner of the Commonwealth… I think the creativity and the freedom to be exactly who you are here, unconstrained, are unique in the world. And everywhere I’ve travelled, I’ve been struck, as soon as I’ve come home, that you have that here. I think that you can take it for granted if you always lived here.’

As ever, the subject of scent keeps cropping up. When he arrived here in 1982, he worked as a waiter in Covent Garden, got a bonus ‘for not stealing or being drunk at work’ and spent the money on Penhaligon’s Blenheim. He’s worn that and Christian Dior’s Eau Sauvage all his life, though he showers his wife Joan Washington, a dialect coach who’s recently been working with Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston, with all sorts of different perfumes. At the moment, she’s steadfastly wearing Jack (as are Olivia and all her friends), and her clients have, unprompted, asked her where they can get it, ‘a great encouragement, to get celebrity endorsement without begging for it’.

Before we part, I ask him to share his favourite smells. ‘Leather furniture, car bonnets after they’ve been driving a distance or they’ve been in the sun and the metal is hot, that has a great smell. And there’s no fruit that I can’t put my nose to.’

And his least favourite? ‘Champagne breath is like a poodle’s arse, it is absolutely rank! And it looks so beautiful and bubbly. Milk and cheese is the equivalent to me of running shoes. And the smell of chocolate I find particularly repulsive. But you have no choice in these things. It’s in your DNA.’

Portraits by Ian Derry