The REG Temple is the official website for actor, author and director Richard E. Grant.
Richard has appeared in over 80 films and television programs, such as Withnail And I, The Scarlet Pinmpernel, Jack & Sarah, L.A. Story, Dracula, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Gosford Park & The Iron Lady. In 2005 he directed his first major release, Wah-Wah.
This website is unique in that it has been run and maintained by volunteers and fans since 1998. For more information on its origins, please click here.
It’s not Duck, Sutherland, or Ronald Mc. There is only one Donald, and it’s the one which has a few skyscrapers, several golf courses, and some amazing hair.
Richard met with ‘The Donald’ while filming Hotel Secrets and here he recounts their meeting, which even includes an impersonation of the publicity-shy billionaire.
In his new TV series, Richard E Grant unlocks the secrets of five-star service, fine dining and luxury suites. So, what’s the key to a truly great stay?
By Ben Ross.
You don’t have to wait long for Richard E Grant’s inner Withnail to surface. “Free to those that can afford it,” he proclaims during the opening sequence of his new series, Richard E Grant’s Hotel Secrets. “Very expensive to those that can’t.” It’s a line he first delivered in character back in 1987, triumphantly flourishing the key to a crumbling cottage in Cumbria. (“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”) He’s resurrected it to describe some of the most opulent accommodation in the world.
Fans of black comedy Withnail and I, the film that saw Grant delivering a portrait of a dissolute actor that was equal parts drunken languor and mischievous devilment, will see shades of that same intensity in Hotel Secrets, as he cavorts like a gleeful child around LA’s Chateau Marmont, or sweeps, awestruck, through Le Royal Monceau in Paris. Grant can’t sit still for a moment: playing with remote-control loo seats, walking off with dining-room chairs, chomping down haute cuisine. He snuggles up to the “living art” (a model employed to lounge behind reception) at The Standard in Hollywood. He’s agog as he plonks himself down at Charlie Chaplin’s old table in the Beverly Hills Hotel – “It feels like the Holy Grail of where you can go as an actor”. He gasps with appreciation as he surveys the view from the Ty Warner Penthouse Suite in the Four Seasons New York (at more than $40,000 a night, one of the most expensive in the world).
When we meet – appropriately enough at The Savoy in London, which also features in the series – Grant is still fizzing away, taking great gulps of still water (he’s a lifelong teetotaller) before addressing the thorny question of why he’s presenting a television series that focuses on the utterly unaffordable during a time of penny-pinching austerity.
“I got my head round it,” he says, “by thinking that, in the middle of the Depression, Hollywood churned out Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers fantasy movies. So I think we have an appetite for not being faced by the really grim economic stuff that we’re fed on a daily basis. Having a peek into the thin-crust crème brûlée of how people live at that level is voyeuristically interesting to do.”
Is the task something he relishes? “If you are hyper-curious, and you want to find out what goes on in making up a luxury hotel, it’s the best job in the world, because you have the advantage of going backstage. The designers, the bellhops, concierges, receptionists, chefs, pastry chefs, cleaners, everything – you get the whole gauge of it. It’s exactly the equivalent of a theatre: you’ve got the front-of-house show of it all, where the performance of the hotel takes place. But everything that is backstage is a world within a world, a hermetically sealed microcosm of people, dedicated to giving five-star service and pleasure.”
The series is certainly escapist. The camera dwells longingly on gleaming Jacuzzis (often occupied by a fully clothed Richard E Grant) or the vast open spaces of luxury suites, on swimming pools, on tinkling fountains, on exotic – or garish – design details. Happily, just when the sheer unattainability of it all is in danger of alienating the viewer, Grant’s sheer enthusiasm pulls the show onwards. He seems to have a particular affinity for his interview subjects, roaring with shared laughter or badgering them like an amiable Jeremy Paxman as the mood takes him.
Admittedly, some encounters are friendlier than others. In the first episode, racily entitled “Power and Money”, he confesses to “sphincter-winking terror” when going to meet hotel mogul Donald Trump (who gives a lengthy monologue about the unhygienic tradition of shaking hands, before Grant gets him to confess that he does it anyway so that people won’t hate him).
Bantering with the back-room staff is an easier task. “The bellhops at Manhattan’s Palace Hotel that was run by Leona Helmsley [New York’s ‘Queen of Mean’, who was eventually jailed in 1989 for tax evasion] in the 1980s: these guys were like something straight out of Damon Runyon. They were all coming up to retirement. They’d worked together for 35 years, and the stories that they had to tell were just a gift. And that was completely unexpected, as opposed to the sort of model-actor-waiters and staff in some of the LA hotels, for whom the job is just a stepping stone.”
When it gets seriously weird, such as at the Barkley Pet Hotel and Day Spa near Los Angeles, Grant just lets it wash over him. “When I read the brief beforehand I thought, oh dear: this is Louis Theroux, freak-television stuff. But when you go into it you realise there’s somebody out there who has got a lot of money and wants their dog to be given five-star treatment and to have closed-circuit television in their little kennel, so that they can see them at all times. You scoff and it’s completely bonkers, but if somebody’s providing that service, then why not?”
The “free to those that can afford it” line has particular resonance during a segment on Las Vegas, the Sin City of “comped” luxury hotel suites handed out by casinos to encourage high rollers. Grant’s interview with Steve Cyr, an independent casino host (or, as Grant puts it, a “gambler wrangler”) reveals a sort of aghast incomprehension.
“I’ve never gambled. As an actor, and being self-employed, I just live in terror of being in debt … I’ve said to people, ‘as you get off the plane, why don’t you just take this wad of cash and flush it down the loo?’, but they land in Las Vegas going: ‘How much money am I prepared to lose?’ … which is a very, very odd psychology.
“When I saw Steve and his client gambling, Steve was like a kind of circus master in the bullring, whipping the guy up. He was having a conversation with the dealer, and the people who were providing drinks, and he was encouraging this man to spend money, which wasn’t his money. But he clearly got off on all that, and then got a commission.”
Looking back, did he ever imagine that one day he’d be granted a free pass to all this bling? “I hoped that I could make a living as an actor. But how I’ve ended up doing so is beyond anything I could have ever anticipated. I thought I would be lucky if I could work regularly in the theatre, never in a city like London. So it’s been beyond all expectations on my part.
“But you are prepared for it, in that from the moment you start doing movies, the level of luxury in the hotels that you stay in goes from nought to 100 miles an hour instantly. If I’d never done a movie, and I was plonked into this series, I would have been much more wide-eyed.”
So what does he look for in a hotel? “Personal service. It doesn’t matter how big it is or how many gold taps there are in the bathroom. It’s that somebody gives you a sense that you’re being personally looked after. The Four Seasons hotel in New York is absolutely brilliant at doing that.”
Does he ever complain when that personal service doesn’t come up to scratch? “Never. No, if I have bad service or a bad experience I just won’t ever go back there.”
What about tipping? “I always tip, because I was a waiter in Covent Garden and I know that that’s what a waiter relies on, and unless the service has really been pants, I feel duty-bound to over-tip, or to tip generously.
“Once while I was a waiter, John Cleese came in, and I served him. The other waiters dared me to tip soup all over him and get Basil Fawlty to come vipering out of him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I subsequently got to know him, and told him about this. And he said yes, you would have been walloped if you’d poured half a bowl of soup into my crotch.”
Grant returns to his waiting roots later in the series, when he’s trained to carry a tray properly at The Savoy, a skill he masters with the aplomb you might expect from a one-time member of the “downstairs” cast of Gosford Park. He seems equally at home chatting to former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. “The big challenge with her,” he says, “was trying to compete with her 25 macaws, which were flying around the room, nesting in her shower, and trying to peck you.”
Grant lets the viewer draw their own conclusions about the people he meets. “I kept in the back of my mind that I wanted to be able to go back to all these hotels, and to look the people in the face that I had spoken to, rather than go to the camera behind their backs and say: ‘This person is an absolute Satanist’.”
He pokes his nose round the grandest and greatest: The Ritz, The Goring, Waldorf Astoria, Caesar’s Palace. But it’s all a show, and Grant knows it. “It’s what Napoleon said about a throne being only a bench covered in velvet. The bed that you slept in? Tomorrow night somebody else will be sleeping in it. That’s the great egalitarian nature of staying in a hotel. No matter how ponced up it is, it’s still a room for hire.”
‘Richard E Grant’s Hotel Secrets’ starts on Sky Atlantic HD at 9pm on Thursday 25 October
Forget the exploits of James Cracknell, Freddie Flintoff, or David Walliams, because Richard E Grant has shown real courage during a four month tour of the world’s most fancy hotels. No pillow, no matter how soft, was left untested by this fearless investigator of luxury. In the first part of this interview with Richard he recalls the trauma of lying on beds intended for heads of state, and takes us on a tour of a room that costs $40,000 per night. Which is decent value, as it comes with free Wi-Fi.
Here is a short trailer for Richard E. Grant’s upcoming Hotel Secrets. In the series REG bravely shoulders the horrendous task of test-driving the world’s fanciest hotels, and he reveals some of the swankiest places, explaining in great detail an encounter with Donald Trump. He even impersonates him.
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Withnail And I star Richard E Grant has added a new string to his bow as presenter of Richard E Grant’s Hotel Secrets for Sky Atlantic. The show reveals the truth about the luxury travel industry and what goes on in some of the world’s best known hotels. The actor talks to KATE WHITING about 5,000-dollar burgers, David Coulthard’s favourite haunts and his own worst hotel experience
WHAT ATTRACTED YOU TO HOTEL SECRETS?
I got to meet, interview and stick my head into places you’d never get the opportunity to in real life. They reckoned that as an actor, I’d travelled and stayed in a lot of hotels, so the combination of being a nosy parker and well-travelled made me the ideal person for this job.
Obviously Martin Clunes wasn’t available, so they asked me.
DID YOU GET TO STAY IN THE HOTELS?
I stayed in about half of them because we were on such a tight schedule. We were visiting about six to eight a week, but sometimes there was no availability in a place such as Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. The hotel was completely full, so I stayed in another hotel nearby, which was pretty gorgeous too.
WHICH WAS THE MOST JAW-DROPPING HOTEL?
There was a suite of rooms in the penthouse of the Caesar’s Palace hotel in Las Vegas that you can’t rent, they are comped by the hotel to people who are the highest gamblers. It has a cyber golfing range where you programme in which golf course you want to go to, so I put in St Andrews. It’s got Jacuzzis with unbelievable views, private security, private elevators, room service, butlers, masseuses, a grand piano, home cinema and could sleep up to 16 people and then there are staff quarters for your pilot too. There’s also a 40,000-dollar-a-night penthouse suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York; they have a waiting list of people trying to get in. These are people who are so wealthy they’ll take it for three weeks. It’s a creme brulee crust of wealth. You’re seeing what people can spend their money on and it’s completely bonkers.
WHAT WAS THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS SERVICE OFFERED?
There was a concierge at the Mark Hotel in Manhattan who said a Middle Eastern client had asked for a hamburger which he’d had up the road to be delivered to his friend in Jordan the next day. He put down 5,000 dollars on the concierge’s desk and she said, ‘Yes of course’. So she found out the restaurant, got the chef and the recipe, and emailed it to a hotel in Jordan, made sure it was wrapped in similar paper and delivered. So he had the illusion it had been put on a plane. That sort of initiative is extraordinary. Now whether the man who ordered the burger knew that she’d done that or not is kind of irrelevant, the fact that she’d said yes and delivered meant that she got another 5,000 dollars.
WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A GOOD HOTEL?
I’ve stayed in so many hotels now, I like feeling that you’re personally valued as a customer and that applies to everything, it could even be a chippie where somebody knows you and look after you. I interviewed David Coulthard in Monaco and he said after a while, when you’ve been around the world as much as he has and have the money he’s earned, the metres of marble and gold taps becomes less important than when he gets to reception and somebody says, ‘Mr Coulthard, it’s wonderful to see you, please come this way’. He says if he’s standing at reception and has to wait five minutes while someone is blathering away on the phone and he’s jet-lagged, he doesn’t want to go back to that place.
HAVE YOU EVER WORKED IN A HOTEL OR RESTAURANT?
I was a waiter in Covent Garden for six months in 1982. I was never drunk on the job because I don’t drink and that in the waitering world is a bonus. And I didn’t steal anything. I worked in a hotel too in my university holidays to earn money. I worked in the PR department and had to remove dressing gowns that people had stolen and say,‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs… but you seem to have accidentally packed two bathrobes, four ashtrays and some pens, I’m just going to have to remove them’. Housekeeping would phone up and say these things have gone missing. What they do in hotels now is they have labels in them and things on the desks that say, ‘If you would like to purchase this robe, it can be added to your bill’ so people don’t scarper with them.
WHAT’S YOUR WORST HOTEL EXPERIENCE?
I stayed in a hotel on the Red Sea which was terrible, the smell was bad, the hotel wasn’t finished, the food was a buffet that looked like it had been hanging around for five days and then when I left and went back to Tel Aviv to do some filming, I was strip-searched at the airport with a torch shone up my bum because I only had diving gear with me and they accused me of being a spy that had come from Egypt into Israel. I stupidly didn’t have my passport on me because I’d flown from Tel Aviv to Eilat which is an internal flight. My wife said, ‘Ah a woman is quite used to having a torch shone up her front bits at all times of the year by a gynaecologist, don’t feel so special’, so I couldn’t even get a brownie point on that one!
HOW DIFFERENT IS PRESENTING FROM ACTING?
There’s no script, no costume, you can’t blame anybody else. It’s very enjoyable to be able to ask people questions and fly around. I’ve gone back to my day job now though, I’m doing the Doctor Who Christmas special and a film with Jude Law, so I do have to go back into my costume and make-up and behave.
:: Richard E Grant’s Hotel Secrets starts on Sky Atlantic on Thursday, October 25
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