The Herald Scotland Website – 5th October, 2011

OOMG, you find yourself muttering under your breath, shocked at using this (much) younger person’s clichéd exclamatory of choice, but even more shocked at what Richard E Grant is wearing.

After all, given the series of louche exotics, oddballs and upper class toffs he has played over the years, you half expect to find the actor in his Winnebago slumped in a winged chair wearing a velvet smoking jacket and a cravat, sipping a G&T and saying: “Chin chin.”

Not this get-up. This outfit knocks you right on the chin. The rather smart suit (Armani?) is contrasted sharply with a tatty string vest and a head bandage so soiled it looks as though it once did a shift at the Somme. And there’s his face, which appears to have been screeded with an inordinate amount of fake tan.

“I play a Tory politician who gets kidnapped in Govan by a Glaswegian terrorist jihadi cell,” he explains in serious voice as if he were being interviewed by The Stage about a Strindberg role. “The head bandage is worn because I have to make a hostage video, so I’m dressed up to look like Rab. And I have to read Rab’s demands, in my English accent, from a board.”

Aha. Rab is, of course, the (sore) head of the Nesbitt clan. But what’s an actor from leafy Richmond who’s made over 30 films doing in less leafy Govan? Slumming it?

“I was amazed to be asked [to join Rab C Nesbitt],” he says, his voice shifting to a hugely upbeat tone. “And as a fan I jumped at the idea. My wife is from Aberdeen and I’ve watched the show since it started. But it was nerve-wracking when I arrived because Nesbitt is an institution and I thought I’d be fired after the first day. However, I’m grateful for the acceptance. There’s been no shortage of great chat on set, thanks to the Gasbag [Elaine C Smith]. She’s hilarious.”

Modesty? Humility? Govan street cred? Not what you’d expect from a creature brought up in Swaziland amongst reactionary colonials who could order an attack on hillside natives as easily as their next Pimms.

But the diction distorts the political reality. An actor friend in common reveals that on the 2009 film First Night, Grant took the producers to task when he realised the lower orders were not being paid their dues; he threatened to walk if fairness didn’t ensue.

Interestingly, although Grant plays lots of Tories (he also stars as Michael Heseltine alongside Meryl Streep in the Thatcher biopic Iron Lady) his politics are unflinchingly egalitarian.

“The privilege of being an actor is getting into the mindset of someone who has led a completely different life,” he explains, his pale baby blues twinkling. “I haven’t been asked to play a paedophile – and even if Spielberg came along with that I would balk at the idea – but everything else is up for grabs.”

Grant was informed by his African experience and appalled by social injustice. When he arrived in Britain in April 1982, during the Falklands war, he discovered much more of the same.

“I loathed Thatcher,” he recalls. “My impression of her is that she never listened. Towards the end she’d come into Cabinet meetings having already made key decisions, utterly corrupted by her own megalomania.”

“I suppose it’s almost Shakespearean the way she’s ended up. But look at Tony Blair, who started the illegal war in Iraq. He’s now this great peace envoy. Is this to salve his conscience in the middle of the night while he banks his £50 million? No, he has blood on his hands and it won’t be washed away.”

Grant admits he’s captivated by politics. “I worry a lot,” he says. “But how can you not worry about the world, unless you’re stupid? It’s the age we live in the drama that goes on feeds and informs your life, as an actor too.”

The 55 year-old may often play men with enormous egos, but his own seems in healthy condition. Indeed, he declares himself fortunate to be in the business at all.

“You need one great piece of luck to get started and mine came in 1986 when I landed the part in Withnail and I. If that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you now. There are so many people who are brilliantly talented who don’t get the break.”

Is he driven by ambition? “I don’t know how you measure it. I think being gainfully employed in this business is success in itself.” He adds: “There are actors who believe they have a right to all the best parts, but therein lies madness. I think the business doesn’t attract the most tightly wrapped psyches in the first place.”

Hollywood success certainly hasn’t turned his head. “No, because you’re always aware of the pecking order, there’s someone up there on a giant billboard in a film that’s just taken $25m and they’re much younger than you.

“Susan Boyle was here [on Rab C Nesbitt set] filming and she became more successful and richer literally overnight than anyone in the history of showbiz. That’s after taking five buses to get to her audition. But how can she cope with it? You’d have to be superhuman. The only hope in the business is to stay close to people you know well, where you come from.”

He speaks from experience, having had a nervous breakdown, which he talks openly about. And that’s why it’s hard not to like Grant. His leitmotif is unbridled honesty – evidenced in his 2005 autobiography The Wah-Wah Diaries, in which he explored his father’s alcoholism and his parents’ unravelling marriage. “I wrote it from the safety of being middle-aged. At 20, I’d have offered a more polarised version of events. But life bashes you about a bit and you gain an understanding of why people do certain things.”

Grant, who once starred in the Spice Girls movie, also reveals himself (delightfully) to be an unashamed populist who admits he was “bereft” at the end of I’m A Celebrity, and who described Gillian McKeith as a “narcissistic gorgon”.

Yes, he’s a little eccentric but great company all the same, his face almost always deadpan when delivering gags, even when wearing a head bandage.

He’s even funny when talking serious politics: “Those grubby, grasping, pigs in a trough” and the “Lembit Opiks out there who’ll do whatever to grab attention”.

It’s not hard to see why he loved his Rab C Nesbitt experience, which satirises political opportunism. But will our less concerned leaders get their comeuppance? Does he believe in karma?

“I’d like to think there is such a thing,” he says, with a wry smile. “But then Idi Amin lived out his days in Saudi Arabian luxury – and died at the age of 9000 or whatever.”

Rab C Nesbitt, BBC2, tonight, 10pm.