“I knew it would be a flame that would die down very quickly, and that’s exactly what happened,” Richard E Grant tells me, talking about the comedown that’s following a frenetic, flashy 12-month period.
He’s sitting across from me at a hotel in Manhattan, pre-quarantine, and reflecting on a year that started with a role in true-crime black comedy Can You Ever Forgive Me?, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and ended with a part in the 2019 film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
He’s far from glum about the calm after the hurricane (when we meet, he’s on such ebullient form that it’s hard to imagine him being glum about anything) but he’s confident that, at 62, he won’t be “the guy of this moment” at any other point in his career. He is, he says, a “journeyman” actor who briefly moved out of the wings and into the spotlight. It’s a definition that could be viewed as overly self-deprecating, given his body of work, but there’s something both grandiose and unassuming about Grant, whose luvvie-ness is grounded with a hefty dose of realism.
“I didn’t have a delusion or an expectation that there’d be a sudden shift and I’d be offered a thousand things,” he says of his post-Can You Ever Forgive Me? high. “Of course, I did get offered a lot of stuff.” But he says it was mostly “bad or just entirely unsuitable” or, at times, “inappropriate”, and he’s quick to assure me that his status is by no means a guarantee of anything. He doesn’t get offered roles outright still, having to audition “for every job” he’s ever had, regardless of scale, from Withnail & I in 1987 right through to the reason I was chatting to him, the whimsical new TV drama Dispatches From Elsewhere. The series is just winding up on US screens and premieres on 29 April in the UK on BT TV.
The show, a scrappy yet well-reviewed mixture of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and David Fincher’s The Game, sees a group of disparate Philadelphians trying to piece together a mysterious citywide puzzle constructed by a shadowy company, headed up by Grant’s character.
“We started it not knowing what the ending was going to be,” Grant tells me, confessing that the chance to star alongside Sally Field was the “instant hook” – even though he had only seen scripts for two of the 10 episodes, written by Jason Segel, better known for his work in front of the camera. He calls it “a blind leap of faith” but the nature of his work has required him to do this often.
“I’ve had the most extreme experiences,” he answers when I bring up a complaint I’ve often heard from actors: that what you sign on for isn’t necessarily what you see on screen. He tells me about the good: the underdog project that was Withnail & I, a film that shouldn’t have been a hit on paper (“All the odds were stacked against it”) yet remains the role he’s most associated with. Then he tells me about the bad: playing the villain in notorious 1991 flop Hudson Hawk, a failed summertime re-team for Die Hard producer Joel Silver and star Bruce Willis.
“I sat with [co-star] Andie MacDowell and our agents when we were encouraged to go and see a screening of it before its premiere, and Andie and I both looked at each other simultaneously and said, ‘We will never work again’,” he says.
“So, with the best intentions, I think it’s like internet dating or any dating: you go into something hoping you’re going to fall in love and it’s going to work out … and then, of course, it’s a living nightmare!”
He tells me that, on the set of the ill-fated action comedy, Willis asked him why English actors so readily take on roles that are “unsympathetic or deviant”, a question that struck him as odd, given that Willis admitted he would “never do that”. “Maybe that’s the definition of a movie star, which is what he is, as opposed to a character actor, which is what I am,” he muses. “It just clearly divided the line between what your career choice or trajectory is.”
He jokingly responds to my comment about embracing versatility by calling himself a “whore for hire”, but his varied resumé, which encompasses everything from Gosford Park to Spice World to Logan to Girls, has also given him an insight into the less glamorous side of the industry. “I’ve got an ever-lengthening list of things on my iPad,” he tells me. “It details where on every production there is some new experience where somebody’s either tried to fuck you over or change something or come up with a new ploy to shaft you. You can never keep up because people are very inventive!”
It’s not something that’s abated with age and experience, and Grant recently traded war stories with Sally Field during downtime on the set of their new show (“... in the way that, I suppose, soldiers show their battle scars”). He also tries to follow his Can You Ever Forgive Me? co-star Melissa McCarthy’s rule of ensuring everyone he works with doesn’t have “a reputation for being an arsehole”, which isn’t always possible.
“When I encounter cruelty or a real lack of consideration or rudeness from people, I will do everything to either avoid them or expose them,” he adds, telling me a story of dressing down a fellow actor who was “notoriously unpunctual”.
Grant is known for his interest in the sex lives of others (he once said that his first question when taking on a character is related to their bedroom activities) so when I tell him my most recent first date was 30 minutes late, he tells me not to shag him until he shows up on time, not a bad rule. His carnal curiosity has often got him into trouble (“I’m from Swaziland so people would just say ‘How fucking dare you?’ or ‘Shut up’”) but it’s also helped intimate him within an industry that often keeps people at arm’s length. On the set of The Player, Susan Sarandon taught Grant a “pop theory”, he says, about the importance of attracting someone with a complimenting combination of masculine and feminine qualities, a way of understanding people that he still subscribes to now.
Grant says he enjoys embracing the feminine, something that wasn’t always easy growing up in a “sport-orientated and heavy-drinking culture” in south-east Africa. His father was an abusive alcoholic but Grant discovered at 16 that he was allergic to alcohol and found himself getting involved in school plays instead. The resistance he encountered from some at the time (he says the reaction to his teenage desire to act was equivalent to him saying he was going to be “a purple-haired hairdresser”) granted him a certain resilience. This is something he’s utilised throughout a career of rejection, and also last year when he came under fire on social media after his enthusiasm for the star-studded awards circuit struck some as disingenuous.
“It was unfettered wide-eyed-in-Babylon delight,” he insists. “I think because of where I grew up and the circumstances in which I grew up, the [fact that the] good fortune that has come my way has happened in the twilight zone of my life career-wise is so beyond anything that I could have imagined that I can’t help but feel celebratory about it. So it’s undiluted delight – and that pisses some people off because they think it can’t be genuine. I’m not a good enough actor to do that.”
There were also accusations of hypocrisy at the end of last year after Grant was quoted in the Sunday Times as saying straight actors shouldn’t take on gay roles, just after he played a gay man in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and as he was shooting the big screen adaptation of hit West End musical Everybody’s Talking about Jamie, playing a gay drag queen. “I’m glad you brought that up,” he says. His remark was in the context of comments made by actor Darren Criss, who “made a very public grandstand” about never playing a gay character again after “being given every award going” for his role in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. “I said I think that you have to be very sensitive and aware that you are taking a role away from somebody, and you have to really justify why you are doing that but, of course, it was quoted and misquoted subsequently that only gay actors should play gay roles, which is not what I actually said. This is the way of the world … I then got trolled on the internet.”
He is – perhaps predictably given the buoyant tone of his Instagram feed – far more focused on the positive side of social media and what’s to come next. After our interview he was set to head to Atlanta to prep for a role in Disney+’s Marvel show Loki ,and he also, hopes to return behind the camera to direct a secret project. His first film as director, the semi-autobiographical coming of age drama Wah-Wah, was something of a nightmarish experience, working with a producer he famously fell out with. “I gave my published diaries about Wah-Wah to the producers of this film that are attached to it and I said ‘Be warned because this is what my experience was first time round’ and they said ‘No no no this won’t happen,’” he says. “Travel in hope, Benjamin!”
We start to wrap up, he prods gently to find out more about my dating situation (“What are you attracted to? Masculine feminine or feminine masculine?”) and we say our goodbyes, heading out into the then open streets of New York. Since isolation, Grant has been entertaining his Instagram followers with daily “Withnail and Isolation” videos, one of the few celebrities to have correctly judged the mood during the pandemic, avoiding anything overly earnest or self-obsessed, and just having a laugh instead. Perhaps one Withnail line resonates more than others: “I think we’ve been in here too long. I feel unusual. I think we should go outside.”
