Variety.com – 18th February, 2019

By Rebecca Rubin

Richard E. Grant Variety Facetime Interview.
Photo credit: Martin De Boer for Variety.

An Oscar would certainly be nice, but Richard E. Grant doesn’t need a golden statue to walk away from this awards season as a winner.

The 61-year-old actor landed his first Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Jack Hock, the loyal accomplice of author-turned-literary forager Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) in the biopic “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

Unlike most actors who become jaded by the grind that comes with awards season — its punishing schedule of screenings, interviews on late night shows, and grip and grins — Grant isn’t taking a single moment for granted.

Instead, the veteran is fully embracing the ride, using the long hours spent at industry events as a chance to mingle with his favorite celebrities and meet fans. His social media platforms have become an endearing window into the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, one that lets his 200,000 followers accompany him as he navigates through the perils of awards season with aplomb. When Grant isn’t posting selfies with the likes of Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper, Emily Blunt, and Timothee Chalamet, he is perfecting the art of photo collages and sharing charming videos that capture his genuine pleasure in being invited to the big show.

Ahead of the Academy Awards, Variety spoke with Grant about cruising through awards season, Barbra Streisand, and why he doesn’t have an Oscar speech prepared.

Why do you think everyone has loved watching you navigate awards season?

Goodness me. You’d have to ask somebody else. I never had advice on this other than my daughter, who said to me, ‘This is so extraordinary what is happening to you — tweet and Instagram about it.’ She’s taken these little 30 second video clips and I posted them, and I’ve been completely astonished how much they’ve been picked up. I suppose like anything in life, if you do it straight from the heart, it will connect with people. I’ve seen on Twitter and Instagram that people have said, ‘You’re responding like we would respond.’ You know, people who are not in show business, if this was happening to them. That seems to be the thing that has connected with people.

Can you take me through your what your typical day is like?

It essentially started four months ago when the movie screened in Telluride for the first time. I had 10 days at home around Christmastime and from then on, I’ve been between New York, San Francisco, London, and Los Angeles doing Q&As after screenings, press events, chat shows every single day.

Say there’d be a photoshoot for two hours, then a lunchtime screening Q&A with SAG members or Academy members or BAFTA members, then another press meeting with a journalist at 4 p.m. Then usually in an evening, it was two screenings, which I didn’t sit through because I had to go from one Q&A to another in a different part of the city.

I’ve had a schedule that has been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my whole life before, and I’ve hugely enjoyed it. Because I had nothing to compare it to — I’ve never had this before and I’m quite sure it will never happen again — the entire experience has been one of genuine amazement to me that people have a) turned up and b) had such a positive response to me.

These events involve a lot of schmoozing, but you are allergic to alcohol. How does one survive a cocktail party without a cocktail?

What you don’t know, you don’t miss. When I was 17 years old, I discovered that I’m allergic to alcohol. I’m told the advantage is you don’t wake up the next day with a hangover. I felt like I’m supercharged Duracell battery that just keep on going and hasn’t tired at all. Having said that, after the BAFTAs, I slept for 14 hours straight through, which I don’t remember ever doing in my entire life. It obviously cumulatively takes it out of you, but your adrenaline keeps you going through all these events at parties and the schmoozefest that it involves.

What does a day off look like?

I’ve been at home with my wife, I’ve mowed the lawn, gone shopping, put stuff in the washing machine — all the usual things in life as opposed to living in a hotel and knowing from 9 in the morning to 9 or 10 at night that you’re going from one press appointment to another. That’s been extraordinary and I’ve met such a wide variety of people. I’m not for one nanosecond seeing the blues about this process. I’ve absolutely loved it.

Do you have any good-luck charms or rituals before awards shows?

No, because I’m not superstitious at all. It happens every year that I’ve been observing awards shows, there’s usually an actor that has a surefire through run. Last year, it was Gary Oldman and Frances McDormand. Usually, there’s one actor that’s like roadrunner and just burns the way through everything. I happen to be in a category this year and Mahershala Ali has won absolutely every big award. And as sure as I am talking to you right now, he will win on Sunday. Knowing that means essentially you don’t have to prepare a speech. I’ve been so awarded by the job offers I’ve had, winning 22 critics awards across Canada, USA, and England, I can’t say I’ve been shortchanged in the awards department. The big four — SAG, Golden Globes, Critics Choice, and Oscars — Mahershala has so clearly won those without any doubt that it’s in some way, it makes it easier. The other four nominees, we’ve shared this with each other, you know who is going to win so essentially you enjoy it for the ride it offers. The nerve-wracking thinking — ‘Gee could you or will you win?’ — is taken out of the equation.

Does that mean you’re not going to have a speech planned on Sunday?

Most certainly not. That would be foolish. The man that has to have the speech planned is the man who has had to come up with four different speeches for the four different awards that he’s already won. He’s the one with the duty of coming up with saying something new, not the other four nominees.

You never know…

Oh, you know. The law of averages, if you don’t think so yourself, the bookies, the internet, Google alerts, the world tells you. It just wouldn’t happen.

What has been the most surreal experience that has directly come out of awards season?

Two things. Going to the Governors Ball and while speaking to Emily Blunt for the first time in my life, being interrupted from behind by Tom Hanks saying, ‘You’re perfect in your movie, you’re wonderful, you should win everything.’ That takes you by surprise. Standing directly next to Tom Hanks was Steven Spielberg. Then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Do you want to meet Lady Gaga?’ That was completely unbelievable.

I also had a morning off two weeks ago and I drove up with my wife to Malibu and parked outside Barbra Streisand’s gate. I took a selfie, I asked permission of the security guard, and then posted a letter that I had written when I was 14 years old. I then got a reply via Twitter the next day. That is something that I never ever thought could or would happen. Those two things have absolutely stood out. But what I’ve been overwhelmed by is the generosity of American actors and the American public toward me as a foreigner. That has completely overwhelmed me, and I’m so grateful for it.

How would you react to meeting Barbra Streisand now?

[Laughs] Goodness me. My heart just started pumping the moment you even suggested that. I heard a rumor she’s presenting one of the honorary awards at the Oscars. If I get the chance to be in her line of view, that would be extremely pleasing.

If you end up running into her at the Oscars, are you going to take a selfie with her?

I don’t know if she’d even allow it but yes, why not? As long as it’s from her left side. That’s a pre-condition of her entire career, that she’s shot from her left side because she believes it’s her best side.

What’s the most surprising anecdote you’ve told that people have latched on to?

I was in London and it was lunchtime here, and I just finished eating with my daughter at a restaurant in Notting Hill. She had the live feed of Oscar nominations on her iPhone, and we each had an earpiece in. I then posted a 29 second video standing outside the first apartment that I ever rented in London 36 years ago when as an out of work actor as a waiter. That went viral and had 3.5 million views. I can’t even get my head around that. The fact that people responded in a way that they did to that absolutely astonishes me. I’ve probably met 1,000 people in my life probably or no, 500, and I’m friends with 60. To have that response from something that isn’t a movie, it’s just something that you personally posted online, that has been the most extraordinary thing that’s happened through this whole process.

When did you start to notice how much people love your social media presence?

People stop me in the streets or people tweet at me or Instagram message me. From that, because it’s so immediate, you get a sense of something happening. When that video was on various news channels I thought, ‘Wow, most times people only get on the news when they die or they’ve crashed a car or were in a drug bust.’ That this thing has come out of something positive seems pretty unique to me.

What did you learn from working with Melissa McCarthy?

She is so honest and accessible. There’s no subterfuge, you don’t feel any sort of careerism on her part. She’s so 100% there for the character that she’s playing and the movie that she’s done. It’s a real reflection of what a kind and genuinely passionate person she is. That is why she connects so strongly with audiences. I’ve been in restaurants with her and walked down the street with her, I’ve been at screenings, and she touches people in a way that seems absolutely profound. She, as a person, just seems to radiate and connect with people that very few people I’ve come across with in my life do.

How does awards season compare to shooting a Star Wars movie?

One is an entirely public exercise in connecting with people, and the other is a complete closed signed, sealed, delivered world unto itself that is completely private.

Are both worth it?

You bet.

Financial Times – ft.com – 15th February, 2019

By Alexander Gilmour

Richard E Grant leans forward on a sofa in a suite on the first floor of the Soho Hotel. His clothes are black, his eyes a washed-out blue; his widow’s peak remains impressively predatory. He has the air of a handsome vulture at a funeral. The lighting is so intimate that I can barely read the questions in my notebook.

“Great shoes,” says Grant, emanating charm. Touched — a sole is flapping off my shoe — I address him as “The great Richard E Grant”.

“Such a tart!” he says.

I feel like a tart, but Grant has been my hero, I explain, since I saw Withnail & I in the mid-1990s — and started watching it on repeat.

“I can only be a disappointment,” he replies stoically.

In the film, he plays a flagrantly failing actor, incandescent with bile and booze. It is an inspired performance that has a hold over many (mainly male) actors who never made it, including me. Yet this man isn’t Withnail in real life. He couldn’t be: for 40 years, he has seldom been jobless and he never drinks (he’s allergic).

With Paul McGann in ‘Withnail & I’ (1987)
© Handmade Films/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

He does have Withnail’s amazing face, however. “Thank you,” says Grant. “Well, there’s some irony because when I had my final assessment by a professor at drama school, 100 years ago, he said to me, ‘I think in all honesty you will make your career as a director because you’ve shown real talent and promise for that at drama school, but you’re never going to make it as an actor because you look too weird.’ So, to be told the opposite is a pleasure. You’ve made my day.”

His career since Withnail & I (1987) has been eclectic. Movie credits include Larry Lefferts in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), a sinister servant in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001); he also starred alongside Steve Martin in LA Story (1991). Less critically acclaimed roles include Clifford, The Spice Girls’ manager, in the film Spice World (1997).

He has been in Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey and Absolutely Fabulous. He has narrated a terrifying documentary about wildebeests, has made two strange series about hotels (he loves hotels) and he wrote and directed Wah-Wah (2005), a film based on his childhood in Swaziland. He also appeared in Girls, partly because Lena Dunham is a fan of The Spice Girls. In other words, he’s been very successful by normal standards, but he isn’t Meryl Streep.

With Melissa McCarthy in ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ (2018)
© Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Nonetheless, he has just been nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, directed by Marielle Heller and starring Melissa McCarthy. The 61-year-old has been visibly thrilled by this turn of events. His ecstatic reaction to the news has been viewed more than 3.5m times on Twitter.

When it doesn’t happen to you, you accept that’s just how it is

Why such astonishment? “Because I’ve been, essentially, a character, journeyman actor, as they call it, for almost four decades — so I’ve never been nominated.” He was born and raised in Swaziland when it was still ruled by the British (his father was head of education), and his voice is both actorly and imperiously posh.

“When it doesn’t happen to you — and it happens to a very small elite number of people — you accept that’s just how it is. Because that’s the status quo of every actor’s life, really, unless you’re called Judi Dench or Nicole Kidman.”

Or perhaps Mahershala Ali, who has been nominated in the same supporting actor category. Grant insists that Ali — “who is absolutely a brilliant actor and so wonderful in Green Book” — is a shoo-in. And that’s fine, he says: just making the shortlist means that “I genuinely — hand on my heart — feel that I’ve won already”. (At the time of writing, Ali is indeed the bookies’ favourite, with Grant second.)

Set in New York in the early 1990s, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is about the literary forger Lee Israel. McCarthy plays Israel; Grant plays Jack Hock, her louche and inebriated, tail-wagging, HIV-positive partner in crime. The real Hock was American. “Palpably American,” agrees Grant. “He was from Portland in Oregon and he died at the age of 47, and he was tall and blond. And when I said to Marielle Heller — when she emailed me offering this part, six weeks before they started shooting in November 2016 — I said, ‘Do I dye my hair, do I have a facelift and do I play it with an Oregonian accent?’ And she said, ‘No, you don’t dye your hair, you do it as you, as the age that you are’ — I was 60 at that point — ‘and no American accent.’?”

Grant doesn’t do it as himself, exactly — it probably wouldn’t work if he tried. For a start, Hock is flamboyantly camp and usually sozzled. He is also isolated, lonely and staring death in the face. Beneath the bravura, Hock is a seedy, weeping clown. Grant, on the other hand, is sober and only slightly camp; he appears to be brimming with vitality and contentment.How does he approach a part like that? “My first question is always: what is the sex life of this person? What turns them on? Because I think that’s the basis of what everything in life stems from.”

Sex?

“Yes, I think it comes from that. You can meet people and you can know whether they’re shaggers or they’ve not shagged or they’re looking for a shag, or just somebody that is comfortable with that aspect of their life. I think that profoundly affects almost everything about a human being.”

As Clifford, The Spice Girls’ manager in ‘Spice World’ (1997)
© Alamy/Everett Collection

Indeed, Grant — who has been married for 30-odd years — claims to know whether people “shag” or not just by looking at them, which is unnerving. “You can feel loneliness in people — if somebody’s not had the intimacy that goes with a physical and emotional relationship, it kind of jumps off their skin somehow,” he elaborates. “So, that’s the question I always ask. And I certainly thought that with Jack Hock — his character. He’s somebody, a bit like a Labrador, who will go and shag anybody in sight, if he can get a bed, a bonk or some booze out of them.”

Since we’re on the subject, how does he see Withnail’s love life? “I think that he was so self-obsessed, entitled to a completely narcissistic, self-destructive degree that?.?.?.?I don’t know whether that’s coupled with self-hatred but I think that he probably had no sex. I think he had a poor sex life, unless he turned himself on, I don’t know.”

Wearing the right clothes also helps Grant get into character. “I was given an absolutely extraordinary Spandau-Ballet-past-their-sell-by-date-10-years-too-late-on-an-advanced-middle-aged-man threadbare look by Arjun [Bhasin], the costume designer.”

A decent co-star is no bad thing either. He and McCarthy hit it off “instantaneously”, he says, and their chemistry crackles on screen. How important is rapport like that? “You feel that you are seen, in the truest sense of that word, by another human being — and you therefore trust that person.

With Jemima Kirke in the HBO TV series ‘Girls’ (2014)
© Home Box Office

Then, whatever you’re required to do in a scene becomes something that you don’t even think about. You don’t have to measure yourself.” With McCarthy, “There is no game-playing or subterfuge or upstaging or any of the things that you can deal with in certain sociopathic members of my profession — of which there are quite a few.”

Most truthful acting requires actors to expose themselves in certain deep ways, which makes them vulnerable. For Grant, trust is vital. “Being able to completely trust somebody, you feel like you can play your part in the true, childlike sense of playing — you have no inhibition and you’re completely abandoned to the safety of knowing that person’s not going to dump you in it.”

“Playing” — that’s the heart of being a good actor, isn’t it? Not to grow up in some way? “Yes, not to grow up,” he says. “As you can see, I have the emotional maturity of about a 17-year-old going on seven for the most time.”

Directing Nicholas Hoult in 2005’s ‘Wah-Wah’
© Lions Gate/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

How does he choose his roles?

“There’s no plan?.?.?.?I’ve taken what has been the best offer at that moment in time — and, usually, it’s because somebody’s turned it down and you’re the fifth choice. But, as somebody pointed out to me, Albert Finney turned down Lawrence of Arabia and gave Peter O’Toole his big screen break, so I understand that it’s just part and parcel of the nature of the job — don’t worry about who has turned it down, just grab the opportunity when it comes.” These are wise words for any aspiring actor — in this dicey world, the future is not plotted, it is prayed for.

Grant asks if I am still an actor — in my heart, at least — and why I gave up. (He seems genuinely concerned.) I explain that I did not get far enough, that I was nervous of auditions and hated not being in control. “As an actor, you are completely at the whim and mercy of everybody else,” he agrees. “They can cut and shape and drop you, or fire you or whatever — and you have no control over that.”

Does that not make actors insecure and paranoid and angry all the time?

“Yes, you’re looking at?.?.?.?Not angry all the time. You can’t be angry all the time, but it certainly makes you insecure, yes.”

I wonder if playing Withnail has inhibited his career in some way. After all, it’s the kind of job — like Sean Connery as Bond, Jack Nicholson in The Shining or Al Pacino in Scarface — that an actor can struggle to get away from. Has Withnail cast too great a shadow?

As George, serving Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) in ‘Gosford Park’ (2001)
© Alamy

“When you put it like that, you make it sound as if it is a burden; I’ve never found it to be so,” he says. “On a daily basis — on the bus, on the Tube or in the street — somebody, somewhere will quote a word or a line from it?.?.?.?And the irony has not escaped me that in playing an out-of-work actor, it has led to every single part that I have had subsequently. I owe my career to having got that part — and to Daniel Day-Lewis for turning it down, thank God, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you today.”

He has kept a diary since he was a boy. The story he tells frequently is that he started writing it after catching his mother making love with his father’s best friend in a car.

Why has he kept this record for so long? “You talk about this thing of control that you don’t have as an actor; it’s a way, at the end of the day, to go, ‘This happened, this is who I met, this is where I was.’ Because there’s still a little boy from Swaziland in me that goes, ‘You’re never going to be allowed into this club — this show business world — that you’ve always longed to be a part of.’ It’s a way of making something that feels unreal be real, because it’s written down. Does that make sense?”

Most actors identify luck as a key player in their lives and he is no exception. About 20 years ago, fellow actor Roddy McDowall outlined how he saw Grant’s career panning out in the future: “And he said, ‘From now onwards, and especially when you hit your fifties, the roles are going to get smaller, your salary will diminish and your recognisability will fade almost completely’ I really thought I’d be put out to field like old Dobbin the Donkey by this point in time, not having all this attention.”

Yet here we are. In December, he will appear in the final Star Wars movie and he might — if Mahershala Ali pulls out — win an Oscar. If he does, will he make a big political speech about #MeToo or Donald Trump or something like that? “I think I’d be in such total shock that I imagine I’d probably just pass out and be the first person to do so on the Oscars’ stage.”

Rumour has it that he plays Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. Needless to say, there are ludicrous levels of secrecy surrounding the film and, for all I know, he might be playing Princess Leia’s little sister, but still.

How was it playing the role of Obi-Wan?

“Obi-Wan Kenobi was my finest hour,” says Grant, not missing a beat. “I’ve loved playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, yes. Brilliant role.”

Following in the footsteps of his role model, Alec Guinness?

“Exactly, yes. I channelled him completely.”

This could be a tease. For a “journeyman actor”, it’s surprisingly hard to tell.

RollingStone.com – 6th February, 2019

The Oscar nominee opens up about his extraordinary (and highly volatile) childhood, having a nervous breakdown and where his Barbara Streisand fandom comes from.

By Stephen Rodrick

Richard E. Grant, in his Oscar-nominee luncheon portrait.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Richard E. Grant has seen a few things in his 61 years. He was raised in the then-British colony of Swaziland. He went to school with Mandela’s daughters. He lay silent in the back seat of a car on an African dirt road as his mother screwed a man who was not his father, and then endured said father taking a shot at him in an alcoholic rage.

Later, he moved to London and became an actor making his permanent mark as Withnail, an alcoholic wastrel and the title character in Withnail & I, perhaps the most beloved British cult comedy of all time. He uttered believable lines like “I demand booze” and convincingly consumed lighter fluid. (Despite the fact that, in reality, alcohol makes him deathly ill.) Later, on the set of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, he prostrated himself at the feet of Daniel Day-Lewis for turning down the Withnail role. The Oscar-winner lifted him up and they had a nice chat. During the rest of shooting, however, Day-Lewis refused to speak to him; Grant’s feelings were hurt until Michelle Pfeiffer told him that Daniel’s character hated his character. Nothing personal.

He soon had a reputation as a dinner-party charmer. His longtime friend Steve Martin wrote, “Once, after only five minutes of sitting next to a woman at a dinner party, he was asking about the duration and flow of her menstrual cycle. The question seemed reasonable at the time, and no one was bothered or offended. I can assure you this is true because I was there, and the woman was my wife-to-be.”

At 42, Grant had a nervous breakdown over his tumultuous childhood. At 48, he made the note-perfect film Wah-Wah, a grueling account of said childhood. In his fifties, he started a cologne line, helped break up a fraudulent HIV drug ring in Swaziland and hosted a preposterously excellent show titled Richard E. Grant’s Hotel Secrets, where the Sky Network paid him money to stay in, well, luxury hotels. (This was a real show and not to be confused with Posh Nosh, his dead-eyed parody of fancypants cooking shows.) Film fanatics know him as the insane, quick-to-sell-out director from The Player. Millennials and Lena Dunham know him as the manager Clifford in the classic Spice World. Still, for misanthropes of a certain age, he’ll always be Withnail to us.

Grant is happily coupled and has a daughter working in the casting director business, which makes him happy because, unlike actresses, she gets to keep her clothes on. Still, one thing was missing from his life — and that was an Oscar nomination. Fortunately, the Academy saw fit to rectify that this year and nominated Grant for Best Supporting Actor for Can You Ever Forgive Me?, where he plays Jack Hock, the gay Sancho Panza to Melissa McCarthy’s Leah Israel, a writer of some note reduced to selling author forgeries to pay for her cat shit-filled apartment in a sad-trombone version of mid-Nineties New York City.

The actor was in town and taking a break from awards-season campaigning to speak at a screening last week for Withnail & I at New York’s Film Forum. Age has not dulled his sniper wit. No one was safe — not the host, not the audience, not a questioner who had ventured out, according to Grant, on an “ass-paralyzing” night without socks. He parried and eye-rolled for a half-hour and then disappeared. It was strangely exhilarating.

The next morning, we met at a Brooklyn hotel. He was wearing the same blue velvet blazer and brightly colored scarf from the night before. He looked fabulous.

You basically went from playing a bad guy in Logan, a superhero movie, to Jack Hock in a film written by a woman (Nicole Holofcener), directed by a woman (Marielle Heller) and starring a woman (Melissa McCarthy).

It was a complete diametric opposite — from the most epic testosteronized experience to working on something that was as intimate and estrogen-bound as I have ever experienced.

And, with Logan, you have the reputation/experience for being a fairly urbane, not muscular man. What that experience was like for you?

I was the least muscularized person on the entire set. Action sequences take an enormous amount of time to convert something into literal seconds of action in a movie. Whereas, when you’re doing something that’s as character-based and dialogue-driven as Can You Even Forgive Me?, then you’re essentially doing what we’re doing now. You’re two people sitting talking to each other — it’s two talking heads. As opposed to heads being sliced off in all directions.

‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’
Photo by M Cybulski/20thCenturyFox/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

You didn’t have a lot of time with Melissa before shooting began. That must have been nerve-wracking.

Yes, because she’s Melissa McCarthy — that’s a very daunting prospect. If you really admire somebody and you’ve … I had never seen Gilmore Girls, so I knew her comic persona from Bridesmaids onwards. When I heard she wasn’t available for rehearsal, I though, “Oh, alright, this is gonna be one of those.” You know, you’re an adjunct to a star vehicle. Which, the moment I met her … that is literally the last thing that she is.

We ended up meeting the Friday before the Monday we started shooting. I was very grateful that Melissa felt exactly the same way. And that we did meet for a couple of hours, managed to talk through everything, read the scenes and get an idea of what the other person’s doing. If you read the scenes, that is how you find out, instantaneously, at what level the person that you’re acting with is gonna pitch their role.

Was there anyone in your past that inspired your portrayal of Jack — someone charming, reckless and promiscuous?

When I was trying to find somebody in my own life who reminded me of Jack Hock, I thought of a Scottish actor that was very successful called Ian Charleston. He played the lead in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire movie in 1981. He died of AIDS at the age of 40 in 1990. I’d worked with him, we became friends — and he had this combination of kind of a little-boy-lost charm in conjunction with very openly promiscuous, lush lifestyle and [a] scabrous wit. He’d make you cry with laughter. The last time I saw Ian he was wearing a bandanna, [because] he’d lost all his hair. I asked Marielle, “Can I do the final scene with Jack wearing a bandanna, because I can’t shave my head.” Luckily for me, she agreed to that. That was kind of a homage to somebody that I’d known and liked so much.

Paul McGann, left, and Grant in ‘Withnail & I.’
Photo by Handmade Films/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Did you have more rehearsal time with Withnail?

We had two weeks. Because [director-screenwriter] Bruce Robinson was very determined that not a single word was to be improvised. Every single thing was as he wanted to hear in the script. Nothing was played for comedy value; it had to be played for the desperation of the situation that they find themselves in. He was also determined that I lose weight: “You’re very fat, Grant.” He said, “You’ve gotta lose 12 pounds before we start shooting.” So I’d just spent a year in my unemployment trying to put on weight with weight-gain powder. I had just worked with Gary Oldman, so I said, “Gary, what do I do to get this weight off? He said, “This is what you do … This is the ‘weight-off powder.'” [Arches eyebrows]

Was your breakdown a product of your childhood?

Yeah. I had an absolute brilliant American psychoanalyst. When I literally thought that I was physically paralyzed, he said, “Your father was 42 when essentially he lost his career, he was very publicly cuckolded as a public figure in Swaziland by his wife and he had a 10-year-old son.” I was 42 and had a 10-year-old daughter. And so, he said, “Subconsciously, you’ve just kind of hit the wall.”

And once he unpicked all that, it was revelatory to me because he made it sound so simple. I understood that it was something I had been carrying and hadn’t been able to deal with — I was just angry all the time. It took me 18 months, but ended with reconciliation with my estranged mother, so it was win-win really.

In the 2005 movie based on your childhood, Wah-Wah, there’s the shooting and your love of marionettes as a kid, real-life things you experienced. Was the facial tic the character has something that you suffered from?

Absolutely, yeah.

How did you get away from that, especially as an actor?

Because my stepmother did exactly what Emily Watson did in the movie. She had done a psychology degree and she had done vocational guidance with students. She would just imitate me doing this tic and say, “Let’s get it out of you.” And, eventually, after a year it did. It did disappear. But when I have real anxiety…

It comes back a little bit?

I can feel that it is coming back and I sort of involuntarily do that.

Action sequences take an enormous amount of time, whereas something that’s character-based — it’s two talking heads. As opposed to heads being sliced off in all directions.

In a couple interviews, you still have a sharpness in your responses. Including last night with the host. After you specifically said, “I cannot talk about Star Wars with you,” he then asked: “So, are you a villain?” You might’ve questioned his mental faculties.

I did. I said, “Are you mentally retarded?”

So, that sharpness did not go away once you’d reached some level of peace about your family?

No, and I know very specifically where it came from. My father was incredibly witty and charming by day, and volcanically verbally and physically vicious when he was drunk. So, that divide of seeing people that I knew, as adults, were our family friends — I would then hear his take on them when he was drunk.

Right.

So, that schism … I don’t think the majority of children have that, where you say, “This is so and so, this is Mr. And Mrs. Smith and they’re lovely people and they have these jobs.” Then you hear, “Yeah, well she’s fucking him and he’s done this and he’s done that.” So, I think once that template is set in your head, it’s set. You don’t buy just the façade of what people are like. You sniff out the motive.

Last week, there was a lot of buzz on social media about you visiting Barbra Streisand’s home and showing a letter you’d wrote her when you were 14 and she was splitting up with Ryan O’Neal. [Grant invited her to vacation at his home in Swaziland.] You seemed to have great, for a 14-year-old, empathy for her romantic troubles. Do you think that was somewhat connected to the childhood experiences you’d had?

Yes, and I think that because I had read everything about her and that she was somebody that, even though she was famous by the time she was 19 years old, her childhood was so dysfunctional. That is an immediate bond that you have with somebody because you go, “This person I understand.” So, when you hear the voice singing, that’s what you hear, whether true or not. You think, as a kid, Well, if I invite them to come and stay here, they’ll have a good time. It’s fantasy time. When I said to my analyst “Why do I have this ongoing obsession with it?” Because, that fan worship should really pass by the time you’re an adult. He said, “Well some people are sort of emotionally arrested at that stage — and you clearly are.”

Grant laughed and he related how happy he was that Streisand wrote back to him on Twitter congratulating him for his nomination and thanking him for his letter. For a moment, I thought Grant — who, as Withnail, never backs down from a scrap and tells a drug dealer, “I could take double anything you could” — was going to cry.

But an assistant told him it was time to go. He was hustled toward a black SUV. I asked him where he was going. He gave me a conspiratorial grin. “We’re touring Barbra’s childhood neighborhood.” He did a little skip and was breathless. “She’s just so fabulous and amazing.” And then he was gone.

LogoTV.com – 21st January, 2019

By Michael Musto.

Richard E. Grant has won award recognition (and will surely nab an Oscar nomination tomorrow) for his performance as the bottom-feeding but somehow appealing Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Hock is portrayed in the movie as a woozy, boozy, drug dealing, life loving, endlessly propositioning gay grifter who befriends Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), the down on her luck lesbian author who resorts to forging celebrity letters to pay the rent. In one classic scene, Jack lusts after a diner waiter, only to have Lee quip about the food Jack ordered, “How are you gonna eat it with his dick in your mouth?”

At a party for the film—where I simply engorged myself with shrimp cocktail, I swear—I got to sit down with the Swazi-British actor and chat about his characterization and the grizzly early days of the AIDS crisis. Every word was authenticated. [Spoilers Below]

Hello, Richard. Your character is at the end of his road, but I enjoyed that you brought such joie de vivre to him. He seems game for anything.

Thank you.

What was your inspiration for that?

Ian Charleson was a Scottish actor who played the Scottish runner in Chariots of Fire. We did a TV movie together called Codename: Kyril. My wife is Scottish—that provided an instant connection for us—and she coached him for his American accent in a production of Fool For Love. Ian developed AIDS and approached it with a combination of incredible boyish charm and salacious, louche decadence. I thought that combination was maybe something Jack could have. Ian wore a bandana on his head, so I thought I could do that when Jack is dying of AIDS. Ian knew he was dying. He was so young. His appetite for squeezing every last drop out of every day in case it was his last informed this part.

I feel like Jack is one of those giddy drunks who hide a lot of pain. But he wasn’t always so willfully carefree. Why did he end up turning on Lee Israel? Because he had to?

He was caught and being a coward. And he was somebody to save his own skin. He’d already been in jail for two years for holding a taxi driver at knifepoint. And he knew he had HIV and didn’t have much time left, and didn’t want to spend it in jail. So he gave her up. She’d had to use him to fence these letters. She expected four or five hundred dollars for them. He’d come back with $2,000. He had a talent for schmoozing in whatever part of town he was in.

Do you look like the real Jack at all?

He was tall, blond, American, and died at 47. I am 61, grey, and English. [Smiles]

Slaven Vlasic/Getty ImagesWhat were your feelings during those dark days of AIDS?

When I tell young people about it, they say, “Are you being an actor about this?” No. A whole generation was wiped out. Do you know Sandra Bernhard?

Yes, since the ‘90s.

Me too. We did [the notorious flop film] Hudson Hawk together.

You’re brave to admit that.

Well, the good luck of that disaster is my lifelong friendship with Sandra. Once, I was going to visit Sandra and Isaac Mizrahi and I saw on the street people holding placards saying they had AIDS and had been abandoned by their jobs, abandoned by Medicare, and abandoned by their families. It’s literally a blink away in history. It was so shocking. An indelible memory.

It was so surreal, you had to be there to even believe it.

Rupert Everett expressed the notion that gay life has been normalized. He said, “You shouldn’t be mad at those kids.” And society has come so far. Would you have imagined same sex marriage?

No. When I was running around being gay in the ‘70s, for example, those rights weren’t even on the table yet. But now that the community has come forward, there are so many setbacks.

It’s always going forward. And you can’t stop it. Who you love is who you love.

Screendaily.com – 1st January, 2019

By Charles Ganti

The latest role for Richard E Grant shares a name – Jack – with his burgeoning perfume brand. The Can You Ever Forgive Me? star tells Screen how it has brought him the brightest acclaim he’s had in four decades of acting.

Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant and director Marielle Heller on the set of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (Mary Cybulski / Fox Searchlight)

It was a little over two years ago, back in November 2016, that Richard E Grant received Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty’s screenplay of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, with Marielle Heller attached to direct. The film would star Melissa McCarthy as impecunious celebrity biographer Lee Israel, who embarked upon a remarkable career forging and selling letters from literary legends such as Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward – would Grant care for the role of Israel’s partner-in-crime and louche, flamboyant barfly Jack Hock? He had 24 hours to decide, because shooting was set to start in January.

“I quipped back, ‘This is like Mission: Impossible, the thing’s going to blow up,’” says Grant. “I then asked, ‘Who dropped out or who dropped dead?’ My agent said, ‘Don’t ask these paranoid questions, just read and respond.’” Which Grant did. He recognised the writers immediately; he had seen Marielle Heller’s Diary Of A Teenage Girl, and greatly admired it; and he’d been a fan of McCarthy’s since first seeing her in US TV series Gilmore Girls, which she starred in for seven seasons from 2000-2007. “So it was not a hard decision to jump in.”

That decision was a good one. Despite the potential commercial challenge of being a film about, as Grant puts it, “two characters who are in advanced middle age and who are both gay”, and also boasting a morally dubious protagonist who has very little interest in being liked, the film has struck a chord with critics and awards voters. The actor, who says he has “never been in a situation of being nominated for things, ever”, is enjoying his belated moment in the sun, with nods for his performance so far from Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globes, Independent Spirits and Gothams, and best supporting actor wins from the New York Film Critics and other critics groups.

Grant spoke to Screen from New York the day before the Gothams, and before returning to his home in Richmond, London to continue shooting Star Wars: Episode IX with JJ Abrams.

What was your response to the story and the role of Jack Hock?

I thought the central relationship – with this platonic love story between this Labrador-like person who licks anybody into submission, who is Jack Hock, in contrast to a real porcupine, unsocialised curmudgeon who is Lee Israel – my immediate movie references were The Odd Couple, from the Neil Simon play, and John Schlesinger’s brilliant Midnight Cowboy. I thought, it’s two complete opposites, operating in Manhattan, surrounded by incredible wealth, and hacking a course of real loneliness and near destitution. That was my steer into it.

And working with Melissa?

We met on the Friday before the Monday start of shoot, went through the script, just to establish how we were going to approach it. I had no idea at what extreme she would play the character, because some of her comic personas have been right out there. It became very clear that she was completely earth-bound, and she was playing her absolutely dead seriously for real. That then influenced what my choices were. And we got on instantaneously. Both of us being on location away from our families, I had lunch with her every single day on the set, and we also went out in the evening. I think that it made for a much more palpable sense of friendship in the film than might have been if we had just been two isolated actors.

What input on Jack’s costumes did you get with costume designer Arjun Bhasin?

Arj had come up with what I thought were absolutely perfect New Romantic stuff that Spandau Ballet and those people wore in the early ‘80s. This was a man in advance middle age on the breadline, who was still wearing those clothes in the early ‘90s: the last gasp of the singles bar type thing. So his clothes were hugely helpful and Lee Israel’s memoir, the only thing that she detailed was that Jack had a short cigarette holder, which he thought, being a chain-smoker, would stop him getting lung cancer. That gave me the idea that he had Peter O’Toole-like aspirations to swan around Greenwich Village.

Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant and Marielle Heller on the set of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (Mary Cybulski / Fox Searchlight)

There are three photos that exist of Lee Israel. The hair and the clothes are as dowdy as all get-out. I had the wardrobe and Melissa didn’t, and Melissa is an ’80s fanatic and was very envious of the clothes that I had, and wanted all of them. It’s the reverse of how things usually are on a movie’s wardrobe department.

You’ve worked with a number of women directors, also including Jane Campion, Madonna, Lone Scherfig and Phyllida Lloyd. Did you feel a different sense of energy, tone or rapport on those shoots?

There’s an immediate atmosphere of being ‘detestosterised’, if you like. The movie I had just done before Can You Ever Forgive Me? was Logan, which was basically 300 men with trucks and machinery and cranes and guns and stunt guys, and people with arms thicker than my thighs. So going from that to something that was predominantly female – female writer, director, producer, lead character – the contrast couldn’t have been more acute. What characterises all my experiences of working with female directors is the emphasis on the emotional content of everything, which is what the huge attraction of doing the job is for me.

Although it’s worse for female actors, does it frustrate you that roles for an actor your age are likely to be supporting or character parts?

I’ve been doing those for so long. My entire career has been that. I am genuinely and frankly astonished that I am working at the level that I am at the age that I am. I met the late Roddy McDowall when I had just turned 40, and he said, “From now onwards, any parts that you get, any recognition that you have, and any money that you earn, is going to be diminishing returns as you get older. And you can make a conscious choice, either to be like many, where they become bitter and twisted and disenchanted with the fading of their careers, or you can go, ‘I am the luckiest fucker, because of the people I’ve worked with, the places I’ve been and how much money I’ve earned.’” I’ve never forgotten that, and the wisdom of it has come home to roost the older I’ve got. So my expectation that I could ever have been in a movie that has been this well-received, and to be in the final Star Wars at the same time, that is not anything that I could possibly have anticipated. All of this feels like gravy to me.

What can you tell us about Star Wars without getting shot?

What I’m legally allowed to say is that it comes out on the 20th December, 2019. I’ve never known [anything like] it. Literally, it’s Fort Knox lockdown security on absolutely everything. You’re not even given a script to take away. You get your sides in a sealed envelope every morning that you shoot, and you sign for it and you sign out for it. And you are required to wear a protective cloak and hood going from the wardrobe trailer into the studio, which is a very short distance, because there have been drones going overhead Pinewood Studios trying to get photographs.

After your autobiographical film Wah-Wah in 2005, do you have more ambitions to write or direct?

I’ve been involved in two other things that I didn’t originate, but both of them collapsed four weeks before we started shooting because of that cryptic final 10 percent of the budget that eluded us. At which point I then got encouraged by [English fashion designer] Anya Hindmarch to try and make perfume professionally, and that then took my focus and energy away from trying to make films into doing perfume, which has proved very lucrative, and a much more immediate result. Not to say that I won’t try again in the future.

How is Jack going?

I have the original Jack, Jack Piccadilly and Jack Covent Garden. Jack Richmond will come out in November 2019. I just got a new distributor who is getting it into many more stores. I’m in the UK, Ireland, Los Angeles and New York. Weirdly, the Asian market are not big scent buyers, there’s no tradition of people buying scent there.

On TV, you’ve appeared in Downton Abbey, Game Of Thrones, Doctor Who and Girls, which are four modern classics. Any more ambitions in that direction?

I avidly watch all of that stuff. If you talk about a golden age while you are in the middle of it, it seems to me that television now, especially the long-form we have on Netflix and Amazon Prime and all these things, is unprecedented. I can remember in the early ‘80s, The Jewel In The Crown and Brideshead Revisited were the landmark long-form television events. At that time, there was such a clear division between people that acted on TV and people that acted in movies. Not anymore. The quality of writers and directors who work in television now are as good as it gets. I watched Breaking Bad, four days and nights in one fell swoop.

Do you also get out to the cinema?

I go at least twice a week. ROMA and The Favourite are hands down the most astonishing things that I’ve seen this year. I’ve seen both of them twice. Just when there’s all the brouhaha about Marvel and tentpole films dominating everything, and you see those two, it revives any flagging faith that anyone might have in what movies are capable of doing.