The Telegraph – 22nd March, 2012

By Tim Walker.

Richard E Grant says he struggles to be cast in working class roles.
— Photo: PA.

Richard E Grant, the actor, claims that he would win more roles if he was working class.

Despite all the talk about well-bred actors getting all the work these days, Richard E Grant feels that it is actually working-class stars like Timothy Spall who are making the real money.

“I don’t think it’s the case that ‘posh actors’ get more work than others,” he says after a screening of Spall’s short film Boy, as part of the British Airways Great Britons programme.

“Actors always think that others are getting more work than them. In my case, they usually are. Tim Spall is not a posh actor and he works a great deal more than me. If I spoke like Tim Spall, I’d probably get more parts.”

The star of Withnail and I was educated in Africa, where his father was the head of education in the British Protectorate of Swaziland. “I would love to play your common, everyday guy, but I never get cast as that,” he says. “It would be fun to play a chav and chav it up, but I can’t see it ever happening.”