The Scotsman Magazine – 1999

By James Rampton
Photograph by Jonathan Glynn-Smith/Celebrity Pictures

Richard E Grant is happy to cast a critical eye on his co-stars, but the man himself is rather harder to pin down. James Rampton corners him on the remote set of The Scarlet Pimpernel

We seek him here, we seek him there… We have travelled to Kutna Hora, an exquisitely preserved medieval village in the remotest part of The Czech Republic, in search of the actor Richard E Grant. But like the character he is playing – the Scarlet Pimpernel – he is proving fiendishly hard to find.

He is in disguise, mingling unrecognised somewhere in the midst of the 300-strong crowd of extras. Eagerly anticipating a pivotal scene from BBC1’s big autumn costume drama, the extras are milling around the guillotine in the main square – rural Czech Republic is one of the few places left in Europe that still looks like Revolutionary Paris. But the star is nowhere to be seen.

Out of the crowd emerges a bedraggled peasant selling rosettes in a tatty sackcloth coat, a battered old tricorn hat and a pair of beaten-up old boots. His face is a mask of grime. Peering out through his rat’s-tail fringe, he looks like an I8th-Century version of the former Verve lead singer Richard Ashcroft – only with much worse teeth. As he approaches, he nods at us – and it suddenly dawns on me that we have found our quarry. The Pimpernel is the peasant, done up in this disguise so that he can avoid detection while preparing to rescue another aristocrat from a deadly encounter with Madame Guillotine.

Now 42, Grant has built his career on just this sort of elusiveness. There is a quicksilver quality to his acting that fascinates audiences. The more unknowable he appears, the more we want to know about him. “People are attracted to that air of mystery about him,” reckons Richard Langridge, the producer of The Scarlet Pimpernel. “He’s mercurial. He never walks anywhere – he runs. You can’t quite pin him down. He gives off a mixture of sympathy and danger which people – especially women – find fascinating. He creates a frisson that you don’t get with many actors.”

Having a rare sit-down at the side of the square while the crew prepare for the grand execution scene in which the Pimpernel suddenly leaps onto a horse and cart and pulls down the scaffold, Grant muses that a mercurial nature is a prerequisite for performing. “I think it’s a contradiction being an actor and being well-adjusted,” he laughs. “The job is the antithesis of being well-adjusted. Everything that is fixed and routine is constantly being realigned and retuned. If you have set ideas or are not open to other experiences, then, quite frankly, you’re buggered.”

Grant came to Britain from his native Swaziland in his early 20s and was saved from an existence waiting tables by landing the lead in the cult film, Withnail and I. The role of Withnail, a man constantly at two with the world, defined the cadaverous young star as one of life’s outsiders. “When you start off playing someone so extreme, it’s inevitable that it will lead to other roles,” says Grant. “Unless you decide to play Bo Peep.”

The Scarlet Pimpernel, which starts its second series this week, is another chance for Grant to add to his gallery of unconventional characters. He particularly relishes the fact that the Pimpernel is not quite all he seems; in fact, he is living a double life of which Bruce Wayne would be proud.

“I really play two parts for the price of one -Sir Percy and the Pimpernel,” he says. “He’s an effete, dandyish, couldn’t-scare-a-butterfly social flibbertigibbet Englishman who has a clandestine life saving people’s lives. He’s totally inept in daylight but utterly fearless by night.

On paper a fictional English character saving French aristocrats from having their heads chopped off doesn’t sound too relevant. But the series has been a huge success. That must be because everyone, not just actors, has a professional and a private mode which are invariably not the same thing. The world sees you as one thing when you are in fact a nude, abseiling, bungee-jumping acrobat. That’s very appealing. Having a young daughter and listening to the amount of fantasy she goes into, I see the roots of all that very clearly.”

In person, Grant is a similarly intriguing proposition. Fiercely intelligent and verbally dextrous – he has not written two best-selling books for nothing – he is not above challenging.

“In any other city in the world you can say, ‘I am an actor and I’m currently unemployed’, but in Los Angeles that’s like saying you’ve got leprosy — what he perceives as weak thinking. At one point, he turns a question about typecasting back at me: “how would you like to be categorised?”

His questioning approach to the world extends to worrying about being overexposed. “If you bash people up on a regular basis or wear Armani hot-pants, then you’re courting tabloid coverage. But I am aware that the more you are around, the more pissed off people get at seeing your mug.” He even wonders aloud about the point of interviewing actors at all. “I seem to spend as much time publicising a film as I do shooting it. And you’re required to talk about it while you’re actually doing it. It’s like someone is looking over your shoulder all the time – ‘what did you really mean by that sentence?’ It’s odd. And if you don’t talk about it, people think you’re difficult.”

For all his scepticism about the interview process, Grant makes for enthralling company. For a start, he is deliciously indiscreet about other performers. In With Nails, his bitchy diary about his spell in Hollywood, he writes about Jodie Foster: “[She] lasers me with the compliment that she has just taken four sets of people to see Withnail and I. Oh, sweet, waffle, syrup thank-you Jodie. My brain is bleating to try and act casual, but body parts have curled up to their toes.”

In addition. Grant is one of few actors still holding an Equity card who is honest enough to own up to mistakes. He provides a telling example: “I was offered a part in Priscilla Queen of the Desert five or six years ago. At the time I was also being offered the chance to work with Robert Altman in Pret a Porter. The choice went like this: ‘Do I go with a director who has made one film that nobody went to see, have my legs shaved, my crotch tucked, and sit in false eyelashes in 95 degree heat in a bus for seven weeks? Or would I rather be with Julia Roberts and Sophia Loren in Paris among all the fashion totty of the world making a film with Robert Altman?’ I thought, ‘There is no huge choice here,’ but how wrong I was in terms of the final result. I wouldn’t have missed the experience of working on Pret a Porter for anything because I had a fantastic time. But Priscilla Queen of the Desert is an on-going sleeper hit while Pret a Porter went into the nearest bin. You just never know.”

Such experiences have given Grant clear insights into the random nature of fame. “You know that it’s a lottery,” he sighs, “people go in and out of favour so quickly. I have seen what has happened to Tina Turner, John Travolta and Rupert Everett in terms of career comebacks. They bounced back from write-off oblivion, denigration and the most acute cruelty. You think, ‘well there’s no rule. Nobody knows anything about anything”.

“Look at Demi Moore. Two years ago, she was getting twelve and a half million dollars for a movie, and now nobody has heard anything about her for a couple of years. People go so fast from the white heat of exposure to just disappearing. It’s all like a crapshoot to me.”

He has similarly jaded views about Hollywood. “I was there at the beginning of the 90s because nothing was being made in Britain,” Grant recalls. “When you went to the Evening Standard Awards, anyone who’d been in a film won. I lived in LA for a year and a half doing one job after another. But the moment you’re not working there it all changes, and I’m not mentally capable of withstanding that complete switch between night and day.

“In any other city in the world you can say, ‘I am an actor and I’m currently unemployed’. But in Los Angeles that’s like saying, ‘I’ve got leprosy that’s going to leap off and eat people’s faces alive.’ So you’ve always got to pretend that you’ve got something in development. I’ve seen people bankrupt themselves. You think they are driving smart cars and eating in restaurants, but they have actually got themselves into terrible debt. That’s no way to live a life.”

A producer once suggested to Grant a sure route to success. “He said to me, ‘You should go and do some body building and turn yourself into a muscle-bound leading man’. I looked at myself in the mirror and I knew I was never going to be Schwarzenegger. It was such a ridiculous notion.

“You do think about it because there are people there who tell you that you can be all these things. It’s Pandora’s Box time – ‘if you use this key, you can open that door’. But you know in your heart of hearts what you can do. All actors think they are chameleons, that they can play anybody, but in reality we are much more limited. People who’ve completely transformed themselves are few and far between. De Niro and Day Lewis are the obvious ones, but even they aren’t major box office stars.”

Happily, Grant still has enough clout to pick and choose his projects. His next is his directorial debut, which he is filming in Swaziland – with special permission from the King. “It’s an autobiographical story about my childhood experience of colonial society at the end of the 1960s going through to independence,” He explains. “It’s called Wah Wah, which comes from how an America woman identified the way upper class English people speak. To her, they’re all speaking ‘wah wah’, saying things like ‘toodlepip’ an ‘tiddlywink’ and ‘brouhaha’, and she doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about.”

After that, Grant envisages a new series The Scarlet Pimpernel, but this time set in the Pacific. “He’d be on a ship full of aristocrats which gets blown off course to the French West Indies so that there can be a lot of wet bustier activity. I would be employed under the Anthony Hopkins theory of salary. Of course would all be historically justified.”

Grant is a breath of fresh air in a business stuffed to the gunwales with luvvies gush about how absolutely fabulous everything is. He is that rarity: an actor prepared to speak mind – and damn the consequences. To the last he talks with refreshing candour, laughing loud at the very idea that he knows what he’s going to do next or that he has some sort of career master-plan.

“Actually, I have a career goblin that makes decisions for me,” he smiles, revealing teeth of rottenness not seen since the heyday of Steptoe and Son. “I wish it was that premeditated. I could lie and pretend that it’s all planned that I’m very clever about it all. But the fact is I’m not. John Lennon’s line absolutely applies: life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.”