Dazed & Confused Magazine – 1995

Interviewed by: Kate Hardie

I’m not enjoying writing this introduction. Images of flowing summings-up of personalities and careers fill my head. Those clever twists of journalism declaring they have, this time, ripped from the said artist, actor, model, miniature carriage clock collector……the ultimate in THEM and this is it! “You need never read another interview on this person again! Write them off! Consider them done, committed to type, inner thought, psyche and past experience all revealed…. BRING ON THE NEXT!”

The truth that like anyone, theories, mood even perception of our past, can change from hour to hour seems little admitted in the concocting of Interview World! The fact that what you see up front is not necessarily what you really get, often gets conveniently ignored. OR the journalist goes the other way, desperate to prove they didn’t buy it….YOU! The interview then becomes like the end of a courtroom drama, “I would like to declare that whilst he tried to make us think he was a nice, ordinary, everyday Joe, he is really a raving, ego-packed, self-mutilating mouse-eater….. See Exhibit A: “the water and a ‘bit of’, and I quote, ‘Lime cordial’, he ordered as I arrived!”

I have suffered much patchworking of my personality in print, so…. I am not enjoying writing this introduction. Let’s just say for today, in my opinion, Richard is a true one-off. His career is an odd one. From its public eye start in Withnail & I it has always been unique and daring, but daring in the way that it is not thought out, not a choice to shock or to take a risk, but daring because his acting comes from somewhere inside him that can’t do anything else. Used properly or in his full capacity, Richard is truly brilliant. Withnail is the kind of performance you want to have on a remote control in your own head, to play back whenever life gets blue! Used wrongly or shoved in as the English eccentric or the light relief, Richard always appears to me as a BIG Man squeezed into a very small suit.

Certain directors seem to have tapped into what Richard’s talent is about. He has worked twice with director Robert Altman in The Player and more recently in Pret-a-Porter. Also twice with Bruce Robinson, in Withnail & I and then How to Get Ahead in Advertising (another remote control classic!) With Martin Scorcese in Age of Innocence, Coppola in Dracula…with Steve Martin in LA Story and many, many more. But, sadly not always in full E. Grant glory! Anyone who remembers the Hamlet speech to the wolves in Withnail can imagine what’s possible!

I worked with him for the first time on Jack & Sarah, a British comedy to be released soon. He is terrifying to meet. Lines and observations fly out of him in all directions. His eyes dart around the room checking in case something more interesting than his conversation with you is going on nearby! He needs to be constantly stimulated. And stimulating.

Richard is probably un-sum-up-able….thank God! But he is an amazing, exciting, uniquely talented bloke and I hope whatever he does he’ll always get too bored to be anything but himself.

Kate Hardie: Describe yourself

Richard E Grant: Um, very long faced, skinny of limb, long on chin, receding of hair, that’s how I describe myself.

KH: Describe your personality.

REG: Well, I’ve had it told to me so many times by other people it’s a bit overwound.

KH: What do you mean?

REG: It drives my wife nuts because I get very impatient with things and with people and with myself. It feels like my head’s going round really fast and things around me are not going as fast as that.

KH: What did you feel about the whole fashion industry while you were making Pret-a-Porter? Was it what you expected it to be like?

REG: It was much faster, more glamorous and more obviously sexy on the surface than certainly anything to do with movies. The personalities are sort of larger than life and there’s a cartel of male, predominantly gay designers and this sort of convent cloister of highly paid, genetically perfected supermodels. You know, paid astronomical sums to walk up and down a catwalk in somebody else’s clothes and their allure is because you can invest them in whatever fantasy or whatever you imagine that they might be, just as long as they’re moving. The of course you speak to them, they’re like 19 or 20 years old, I thought that I was a kid when I was 19, but not that I’m 37, I speak to them and they’ve been maybe working since they were 16, they’ve literally gone from home into being superstars. How could they possibly have a conversation that could match the same depth of attractiveness as their looks? I was also amazed at how much money there was involved, and how ruthless it is. I thought it was bad enough for actors. Whereas in fashion, these 17 year old girls walk through these doors and bang, some guy, usually a man says, ‘No. I don’t want you. You’re too fat. You’re too thin. You’re too tall. You’re not the look. And they go through this rejection over and over again.

KH: Robert Altman’s been hit really hard by the press over Pret-a-Porter hasn’t he?

REG: Well he had a big sort of open thing in a Virgin Megastore in Paris where anybody could come and ask questions. And he said that, in relation to the press attitude, he thinks it’s the one time where hype has almost damaged people’s expectations; what they think the movie should be about and what it is about are two different things. He said maybe in two years time somebody will say, ‘Oh I see, that’s what he was trying to say’, or, ‘that’s what kind of movie it is.’ Rather than this sort of hoopla that’s going on about it, aided and abetted by the film company and by him because he didn’t ban the media at all. If a hit’s not a hit, then every theory comes out of the drawer. And moving swiftly along……

KH: Is that depressing?

REG: No. It’s just disappointing because I so loved doing the movie and I loved the part that I played, so I’m not embarrassed about that. I think if I had seen it and though, ‘Christ, that was really embarrassing’, then I wouldn’t be able to talk about it at all. Maybe that’s what some of the other actors felt. Or that they’re all working and I’m the only one available to do press.

KH: I’ve done press for things when I’ve said I haven’t liked them so I can kind of understand that. But I can’t quite imagine it with someone like Robert Altman. I think with someone like Robert Altman, I’d want to support him.

REG: Exactly. It’s not like his talent has gone away.

KH: I really loved your part in The Player and just thought you were brilliant in that. You’ve got a big speech about how we don’t want stars in this film and all that kind of stuff, and yet he (Altman) has so many in his. In a way the reaction to Pret-a-Porter proves, ‘stars’ don’t always do it…..doesn’t it?

REG: It puts a light to the whole star system. I suppose it finally comes down to the content of something, that if it had more content or a better story then people would go. It’s not about the stars.

KH: Do you still get jealous of other actors? Or do you really avoid that……..

REG: Should I lie to you?

KH: Don’t lie.

REG: Don’t lie? Um……..

KH: He puts his head in his hands.

REG: He puts his head in his hands, rubs his tired old premiere eyes and says, ‘of course I do get jealous.’ Do you get jealous?

KH: Don’t you wish that sometimes you hadn’t done Withnail & I, like, ‘That wasn’t me. That was someone else.’ And you could get discovered in that way again.

REG: In other words you want to portray me as a desperate, sagging towards 40, middle-aged old crump.

KH: No, look I’m 27 and I really want to be discovered again.

REG: I’m getting this book deal as a result of writing the Pret-a-Porter diaries and I’m going back and writing about Withnail and various things in between. That’s a sort of whole new lease in a way because as I’m sure you know from writing stuff, you at least have some measure of control about what you’re doing.

KH: But that being discovered thing is brilliant. It’s like that supermarket game where you push the trolley around and you put as much stuff in it as you possibly can, isn’t it? It’s like, ‘You’ve got two years. Run around the career supermarket, shoving things in your…..’

REG: Get the biggest boxes right now.

KH: Yeah. Because later on you’re just going to walk around and they’ll go, ‘Richard E. Grant, sweet things over there. Kate Hardie, frozen foods.’ And you’re fucked. They’ve put you in your area, haven’t they?

REG: Do you have this thing where people assume that you’re working all the time because stuff comes out, even though months have gone by in between?

KH: All the time. Yeah. Do you feel like you are ever not doing it?

REG: On and off. I mean, do you feel like you’re doing it all the time?

KH: No, ‘cause I’m not.

REG: I think it’s very like sex. I do. You have this sort of great spate where you’re working or fucking constantly, like 24 hours a day you’re like this fuck acting machine. And then, you get those bits where nobody wants to fuck you, even your licensed or unlicensed partner in life. And it’s the same thing with the work. I read the first page of this novel that Jackie Collins brought out. I was standing at Smith’s and it said something like, ‘the chiffon curtains were billowing off the Champs-Elysee. They made love for 17 hours.’ Well you’d think you’d have raw, ragged old gonads after 17 hours. I could think of nothing worse than to keep chooking at it for 17 hours.

KH: So working all the time wouldn’t be good then?

REG: Probably not, but I could act a lot longer than I could keep ‘on the job’. I would like to pretend that Warren Beatty and I are sort of…stud beetles of equity. I love the cover of, I don’t know which magazine it is, maybe it’s Cosmo, or one of those where they constantly say orgasms are easy. Have a rolling orgasm. Have 62. These can be yours. Fill in the coupon.

KH: Buy one, get one free.

REG: Fill in this coupon and send for a bar of free soap. You’ll achieve five in half and hour. So having revealed intimate details of my…….

KH: Work and sex life.

REG: My peripatetic work and sex life.

KH: What does peripatetic mean?

REG: What does peripatetic mean? You don’t know what it means.

KH: It sounds like someone’s having a bit of a fit.

REG: It means that something isn’t consistent, that you are never in one place for too long.

KH: But do you feel like you have?

REG: Yeah.

KH: See I don’t think you should have been. What category would you say you’ve been put in? And don’t just go, ‘You know which one’.

REG: Goofbox generic. It’s just because I played the most visible noisy thing in Withnail. That part was so strongly written and characterized. Understandably and inevitably I’ve been cast to play this sort of peculiar people. Now, how much of that is because people genuinely think I’m peculiar, or whether I am really genuinely peculiar or whether when I act it comes out particularly peculiar, I don’t know. I haven’t gotten myself down on the couch to find out.

KH: Was there a point where you wanted to be the hero, the kind of romantic lead?

REG: Well, that film I did with you, Jack and Sarah, is a kind of romantic lead.

KH: And that felt like a good thing?

REG: Yeah, it did. I really enjoyed it. I got to kiss everybody……..

KH: So am I a better kisser than Forrest Whitaker?

REG: You are the best kisser, and you’re the only person I’ve ever kissed on screen………

KH: Our kissing’s been cut!

REG: Your lips are too big for cinema!! Well, you are still the only brontosaurus-lipped actress that has stuck her tongue right down my oesophagus………

KH: You got to kiss everybody.

REG: And I got to be a bit on the vulnerable side of things. Whether that translates into changing what people employ you for, I have no idea because it hasn’t come out yet.

KH: Do you think that if everything turned round and you were suddenly a romantic lead, you’d miss the mad parts?

REG: The producer of this film LA Story that I did with Steve Martin, I said to him, quite seriously, ‘I want to be a leading man’ and he leant in real close so that his breath came up and it left residual on my nostril hair. He said, ‘If you really want to be a leading man you’ve got, like, to pump iron.” I said, ‘What do you mean Dan?’ He said, ‘No, No, seriously, you’ve got to go and pump iron.” I said, ‘You mean, I can sort of Schwarz…..’ He said, ‘Well, look at what happened with Arnold. He was a nine stone weakling.’

KH: A nine stone cowboy. My friend always thought the lyrics of that song were, ‘like a nine stone cowboy’.

REG: A rhinestone loudboy! And you know I walked away from him and I thought, ‘Yes, that’s the answer. I’m going to go and get some pectoral implants. And get myself into the Arnie Schwarz and Sly pumping machines.’ And by the time I’d gotten into my car, and switched the ignition on, I just thought if I was pumped up like the biggest goon I would never ever be able to walk through the door, sort of going, ‘Hi’; I just couldn’t do it.

KH: You see yourself as attractive?

REG: My wife finds me attractive and that’s sort of enough, but I don’t really think………

KH: No, if you’re in films and stuff you have to sometimes look at yourself and think, ‘Oh I look quite nice there’.

REG: No, I never think that.

KH: What do you think when you see yourself then?

REG: I just think, ‘plastic surgery’. I think the absolute minimum could help. I don’t know because maybe the very act of acting is a kind of vanity. So there must be some part of your brain that says you obviously look all right enough to go and plunk yourself up there, but by the same token how has anyone ever employed me looking like I do? But it sort of passes over because I think if I thought like that, I’d have to change my profession. But the prospect of trying to do something else far outweighs the grim reality of watching what I look like. I just always see what it could have been rather than what it is………

KH: What do you mean?

REG: When I watch something, I think, ‘Is that it?’ Do you ever feel that?

KH: Every time I see something I think, ‘There’s more to this than that!’ And there isn’t, which amazes me.

REG: I know.

KH: Do you feel trapped in being an actor? Do you feel like on a bit of a treadmill now? It’s like you’ve gone into the middle of a party and gone, ‘Shush everybody, I’m going to do something now’ and then you look around at all the people looking back at you and think, ‘Oh no, why did I do that?’

REG: No, I think this exactly explains your personality. I think you do that all the time.

KH: What, walk into the middle of parties?

REG: You do, and in the middle of film sets, or in the middle of publicity splurges. You come in and then you just blather off and then you have to go into a shell, a snail-like shell and think, ‘Oh fuck. What have I done?’

KH: When have you seen me do that?

REG: On Jack and Sarah. When the director was trying to direct you, you’d say, ‘Oh, fuck off. Shut up. I know what I’m doing. Leave it to us.’

KH: Well he got his own back, he’s cut me out! (laughs) Anyway, it’s a joke!

REG: I know, but you mean it too.

KH: I don’t respect this business very much and there’s this cheeky bit of me that wants to say the truth in a very loud voice.

REG: Yeah, but………

KH: You can’t do that.

REG: The thing is if you intimidate people or you make them think that you’re just a bolshy little fuck every time you step out the door and they cast you, you run the risk of somebody saying, ‘I will choose somebody slightly less talented who’s gonna give me less trouble.’

KH: I’ve seen you storming up and down!

REG: Yes, I get really impatient. But what happens when I get really impatient, I get fucking polite. It’s like sort of Buckingham Palace OBE line-up polite.

KH: I was amazed by how many famous people you have to work with the whole time now, and whether you felt the same as then a part of them, or whether you felt very separate from them.

REG: I can’t think, with any exception, that I haven’t felt sort of, ‘Oh my God, this is Swazi (Swaziland) boy in amongst all these people.’ I always feel that. Carrie Fisher said to me, she’d seen me on a chat show….they were asking about who I met when I was on The Player, and I said that I had met Streisand, Nicholson, all these big legends. And she said, ‘You were speaking as though you were in a different kind of profession. You’re in the same profession. Those people know who you are, you’re no longer a tourist, you’re one of the attractions.” And I felt like I had been caught out because she was saying, ‘Don’t try to act like you’re just a regular schmo who’s just happened to have fallen in there. Because nobody just happens to fall in there. You have to have some talent to have got in there in the first place.’ But even though I know what’s she’s saying is probably true, I still can’t quite believe it.

KH: Do you think the more famous the person the more confident they are?

REG: There’s a mind of unspoken, intangible confidence. There’s a quality of ruthless self-obsession or self-interest. Even if it’s based on chronic insecurity or whatever it’s just that last 20% of the ego that says, ‘I am it.’ And it sort of emanates from people.

KH: Do you think it emanates from you?

REG: No, I know it doesn’t.

KH: It does!

REG: I know it doesn’t…….

KH: Not in that way, but……

REG: Maybe it comes down to killer instinct. Matthew Modine and I had this really long conversation in Central Park one day. He was convinced that if you could be sexually attractive, heroic and kill people you move over into a kind of real secure stardom. I thought he was talking a load of shit at first. He said, ‘With the exception of James Steward, all male movie stars have done it.’ But this is the kind if insane conversation that you get, this actor talk. And you think, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And he said, ‘Look at the career of Al Pacino. When he’s being a nice guy no one wants to know about it.’ He may be a great actor doing that, but when he was in The Godfather he was untouchable, just mesmerizing, because you knew, and you saw him kill people.’

KH: Do you feel like you’ve killed enough people?

REG: I haven’t killed anybody.

KH: (laughing) So we’ve got to get you a part where you kill people?

REG: I’ve just done this film playing a cop after a serial killer in Prague called In The Cold Light of Day where I sort of carry around a gun. But even just saying to you, ‘I sort of carry around a gun and get to bonk Lindsay Baxter in this sort of psycho house in the middle of the Czech countryside’, it sounds funny to me because I think that’s not what I normally get asked to do. I normally get asked to play the paedophile serial killer part instead of the other one. After I finished doing In The Cold Light of Day I thought, ‘If this is Modine’s theory, I’m carrying a gun and I get the girl at the end kind of scenario, I don’t think, ‘Mel or Tom, or Sly need worry about Swazi boy will come nuzzling in.’

KH: Who do you think actors act for? It’s not for the audience is it? It’s an ego thing.

REG: I think there’s always this certain view that what you do is overpaid, over praised and overexposed. I don’t know. Somebody told me they felt that it was because people didn’t believe in God anymore.

KH: They need actors?

REG: So this need for faith or this investing in some human being, whether it’s a sportsman or an actor, has been sort of magnified.

KH: That’s very scary if people don’t believe in God anymore so now they have faith in actors and the actors who take off are the ones that kill people (laughs).

REG: Yeah, that would be about the short measure of it.

KH: God’s turned a bit nasty. Maybe it’s something about being very powerful.

REG: Yeah, it’s just power. That’s exactly right. Power. The power of the pistol.

KH: How do you feel about doing interviews? I always think, ‘Fucking Hell, it’s so boring reading about another actor.’

REG: I never find it boring.

KH: I always want to make mine interesting because I get really depressed at the idea of people reading you going, ‘They were fantastic’ and ‘I love him.’

REG: Do you think people do read them? Do you think it actually sticks?

KH: I think they’re interested in your theories. If you could re-invent yourself – pretend that I’m doing the first ever interview with you, what would your name be?

REG: Mega Knob.

KH: Mega Knob. You sound like a robot.

REG: No, I don’t know. Richard de Maga Knob. A journalist once said to me, ‘Why is it Richard E Grant’ (French accent), and I thought, ‘Oh yes, you could read that ‘Richard He Can’t.’’ And I thought, ‘Well I haven’t read that yet,’ you know if I put that down for the record somebody can scribble it through, and say, ‘oh yes. Hmm.’

KH: Well, every time you do an interview, do you feel it’s like ‘The Definitive Richard He Can’t?’

REG: I know from writing this book that I have to be so careful about what you say and what you don’t say that if you end up with a sort of luvvie fest of somebody saying, ‘Oh she’s marvelous. Oh, she’s such a cookie. Oh, a delight.’ You just want to go, ‘For fuck’s sake. Pull the fucking chain. There are no genuine shrinking violets in this profession.’ Although I can remember somebody saying to me on The Age of Innocence, “Oh, you know, Michelle’s so sensitive. Whatever you do, be very careful how you approach her……’ And I saw just this instant flash of her in those hot-pants singing in Grease 2, and I thought, ‘No, she did that. She is not that fucking shy that I can’t go and just loddydoody and howdyhoidy.’ And you know, she was absolutely fine, very amenable and funny.

KH: So in a way, all actors have the same ‘key underneath thing’ which is that they are quite ruthless and have a big ego?

REG: Yeah.

KH: You told me Madonna was the only person you’d ever met who didn’t care what people thought of her.

REG: Yes, but I think I was sort of duped because I think she cares passionately, probably more than anybody I’ve met, about what people think of her. It’s the only logical way that I can explain that level of self-obsession.

KH: Was she the scariest famous person you’ve met?

REG: I think she was one of the most obviously unhappy ones that I have met. Even so you think, ‘This is a young woman who has incredible power and what she doesn’t have the power of, and it obviously eats her alive, is that she’s not a movie star actress.’ It’s the one thing she can’t control. It’s almost like, the pop-star persona as soon as it tries to act goes through a charisma-ectomy. It’s like all their charisma, all their allure or whatever it is they have, it’s just taken away.

KH: Can you see yourself acting for the rest of your life?

REG: I’m really enjoying this writing stuff whereas acting is…you know, you’re the tart for hire. And if they can’t get you there’ll be somebody else. Which is why having a symbiotic relationship with a particular writer or director is crucial and it seems to be crucial to so many careers where people work best. Like Scorcese and De Niro – a real classic screen partnership of the second half of this century. When they work together it’s just astonishing, in a way that never is when they’re not.

KH: With you it’s Bruce Robinson and also Altman, and with me it’s Antonia Bird; these people do stretch us. For example if Bruce Robinson had a period drama, and it was the love interest, I think he would take a risk and give it to you. And I know that if Antonia had a kind of incredibly English, shy retiring rose, she’d give it to me. Whereas on the whole, other directors will probably not cast you or me in those parts because, as you say, there’s too many other people they can get it out of too easily. So why take the risk, even if it would be more interesting?

REG: Bruce said that what I do was exactly the voice that he was looking for to portray his point of view. We have a very similar sensibility, I suppose. So that partnership in How to Get Ahead in Advertising was just something that seemed to me a great kindred spirit. My frustration is that he went to America and made a movie which cost $30 million which he could have made for $6 or $7 million in England had he got that kind of finance. He was told that he had to write a thriller that had no politics, no comedy, and American actors, which to me is the most insane thing, because he writes great comedy of character. It’s a bit like saying, ‘Right, we want to buy this prize bull, but we want it to fuck those cows over there to make all these new whatevers, but first of all we’re just going to saw off his horns and then we’re going to put this little metal clamp around his balls and chain it to the fence. And then we’re going to stick a cracker up his ass and say, ‘Right. Go and fuck those cows and produce a litter of hit movies; a herd of hit movies.’’ You know I think he got really burnt by doing it. Anyway, he’s back in England now.

KH: What’s your view of Withnail now?

REG: Exactly what it was when we were making it, that it’s just an incredible piece of good fortune to have got that part. It gave me all the work that I’ve got and has this sort of video life that has gone on and on and on. I got a call from somebody two days ago who said that their 16 year old son, who I’ve known since he was six, is now walking around the house saying, ‘I want the finest wines available to humanity. I want them here and I want them now!’ And you think, ‘Fucking great!’ I love it.

KH: Anything else you want to say?

REG: I’m on fire!

KH: Do you have a motto?

REG: ‘I’m on fire.’

KH: ‘I’m on fire’? Whoa.

REG: ‘Never say no’ is my motto.

KH: ‘Never say no’?

REG: ‘Never say no.’

KH: Okay Richard, do you want to be in 12 episodes of Brookside and then join Eastenders for the rest of your life?

REG: Yes. Of course. Doesn’t everyone?

KH: OK.

REG: No. Maybe the motto should be, ‘You have to say no.’KH: Always say, ‘No, I’m on fire!’ How would you like to grow old?

REG: 114 is my absolute, that’s what I want. But somebody said to me, ‘All your friends will be dead.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ll have new ones, and I’ll have all my old ones on video to remind me.’ That’s what I want. That’s one advantage of having friends who are actors and in movies or on TV; you can keep them.

KH: Is that alright?

REG: Yeah, you were brilliant.

KH: Hey, Richard, you were brilliant too.

REG: You made me feel wonderful, gorgeous, talented, sexually alluring. You’re brilliant, Kate. I worship you and you are a fantastic actress.

KH: I worship you too.

REG: I know who you worship. I saw in your Dazed and Confused interview who you worship; Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. I rest my case.