UK Premiere Magazine – June 1996, Issue Number 41

Interviewed by Gina Morris

Star of Withnail & I, innocent bystander in Hudson Hawk and Pret-a-Porter, Richard E. Grant dishes the dirt in his diaries With Nails.

Richard E. Grant sits alone on a sofa in the lobby of London’s wantonly exclusive Claridge’s Hotel. “Hi,” he says, standing up and pointing towards the lounge. “Can’t go in there, I’m afraid. Not wearing a tie. They won’t let me in. Bastards. Shall we go to the pub?”

You must have witnessed a lot of debauchery and bad behaviour in your time. Did you have to censor yourself when you were editing your diaries for publication?

Does it read like I toned it down? We did have a lot of libel decisions to make [smiles]. The Sharon Stone neck scar story we had to cut because she told us three different versions of how she got it. So it was considered to be speculation and conjecture. It wasn’t my intention to send my publishers so much dirt on people that they’d be wading through it for months. But I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t have a draw full of stuff that was, like, the real dirt on people. [laughs] I’ve got trunk loads!

The chapter on making Hudson Hawk is fairly damning. Was it your least favourite project?

Well, it turned out to be such a bomb – such an all-time bomb – and the critics hated it so much. It was a mess. A very expensive mess. But in retrospect it’s funny; writing about it made me laugh because it was so daft what went on.

Do you think you’ll upset people?

I don’t know. The producer of Hudson Hawk [Joel Silver] was very upset after that chapter was serialized in Vanity Fair. His sister told me. Not because what I said was inaccurate or untrue, but he doesn’t like to be reminded of something that was very painful for him. He’s sort of frightening and charismatic and funny, but maybe he won’t want to work with me again after this. His sister certainly indicated that he was never going to speak to me again.

Looking back over the diaries, do you have any regrets?

You go into every film with the best intentions. That it’s going to be good, you’re going to have a good time doing it and it’s not something you’re going to be embarrassed about at the other end. Of course it can turn out like that. Out of everything I’ve ever done Withnail was the thing least likely to succeed. Now they’re calling it an English classic. It’s fucking insane, you just don’t know.

Landing Withnail as your first film as a lucky break. The desperation you describe before getting the role seems to indicate you would have taken anything.

Oh, absolutely. Anything that would have paid me. You can’t afford to be choosy when you’re out of work. You grab anything you can get. And a lucky, lucky, lucky one that was, I can tell you. There’s a certain type of person that likes Withnail. You can divide them up into two groups and if you don’t find it funny, then fuck off [laughs].

Do you keep in touch with Bruce Robinson (writer-director of Withnail and I)?

We have a sado-masochistic, torturous kind of relationship. If you really get on with someone, you don’t have to work at it. If I don’t see him I speak to him regularly. I have a huge phone bill. He’s very proud of Withnail – his finest hour.

Reading With Nails, it’s startling how many celebrities you’ve met.

It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? You see, that is part of writing it down, because otherwise you forget. In writing it down I can believe I have met them…..I ought to be a lot richer, shouldn’t I?

There’s a section where you meet Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, and all they talk about is shagging. Do you find it amusing in hindsight?

Everybody who knows them knows that’s how they are – but yes, it is odd. What surprised me more than anything was that having a blowjob on Sunset Boulevard turned out to be an advantageous career move. He became famous throughout America as a result of being caught. It’s bizarre – prostitution as a career move.

One of the few people you sent the book to in advance was Steve Martin. Why was that?

He’s been a great mentor of mine. We’ve been proper, lasting friends since working together (on LA Story). He’s also a writer and he told me I should publish this stuff. He read the first, pre-libel version of it and because he’s a very private man I thought if anyone would be offended, it would be him. But he was so enthusiastic.

Have you made many enemies?

I think my nature is such that people either like me or they don’t. If I like somebody it’s indicated very clearly, and if I don’t that’s also very obvious. I find it very difficult to look interested if someone is literally fucking strangling your eyeball muscles with boredom. Farting on about whatever. I can’t do it.

Do some of the situations you find yourself in seem unreal?

I never think about it being normal or abnormal. I just write about what’s going on. I mean, Valentine’s at Madonna’s house: I thought it was going to be this big party and there were only three other people there. It’s so bizarre. That’s why I write these things down. I take something that seems completely chaotic and make sense of it.

You’ve seen Uma Thurman naked (making Henry & June). How do you deal with that?

You wear cement underpants with a large padlock on the front. That’s what you do when you’re in erectile situations. Quick-dry cement down the old pants. But it doesn’t always work!

So what’s next?

I’m writing a script at the moment. It’s called Mud – great title – and it’s about where I grew up, in Swaziland. Purely autobiographical, because someone said to me, “Never write about what you don’t know.” The further I am away from it, the more I realize how extraordinary it was – I feel impelled to write it down. And then I’d like to direct it. If someone gives me the money. If someone thinks it’s any good.

Thank you.

Thank you. I can’t believe you read the whole book. Well done. Let’s get out of this pub. I’m beginning to smell like a fucking smoked haddock!

May 1996

REG was interviewed by Ray Cokes on the MTV program Xray about his book With Nails. Thanks to Nikki for these screen shots.

Plays And Players Magazine – May, 1996

Richard E Grant Talks to Julie Eagleton

It can’t be easy having played a character once described as “the most barking British presence in the movies ever”, but Richard E Grant has nothing but fondness for Withnail, of Withnail and I fame; the manic, alcoholic, permanently resting actor with a penchant for lighter fluid, who first pill popped his way across film screens in 1986, launching Grant’s career in the process. Ten years on Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I is deemed a classic cult film, with a re-release earlier this year entering the national film charts as number 13.

I first came across Richard E. Grant browsing in the Royal National Theatre bookshop, which seems apt as he confesses to reading a lot and gives a favourable mention to Rose Tremain, author of Restoration. “I have read everything that she has written.”

A soon to be published author in his own right, his forthcoming film diaries With Nails, published in May by Picador, chronicles fir film work, including time spent hanging out in Hollywood with a multitude of celebrities, and promises to be very gossipy, witty read. How did the idea for the book come about?

“When I was working on the Robert Altman film Pret-A-Porter two years ago, the Arts Editor from The Observer contacted me and asked if I could write a diary of the film, not knowing that I kept diaries anyway. Because of the successful way they were received, I got a literary agent who asked me to write about the making of Withnail and I.”

Grant has been keeping diaries since Withnail and views it as a form of psychotherapy, especially when working in Los Angles. Writing a diary forces you to take on board what is happening and try and sort it put. It’s overwhelming when you go there because of the amount of money, in conjunction the amount of stars per square mile in Beverly Hills. As strong as you think you are going to resist temptations, I don’t know how, who or what you have to be to really resist it and say I wouldn’t do this or I wouldn’t do that.”

The last decade has seen Grant work with the biggest Hollywood film directors including Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese: role as diverse as an ultra camp fashion designer sporting a large kisscurl on this forehead in Pret-A-Porter to a loopy filmmaker in the Player, the satirical view of filmmakers in Hollywood. Was it scary working with such renowned directors?

“It was scary and exciting but everyone felt that way. Working on the film The Age of Innocence, Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day Lewis would come into the makeup caravan in the morning and say ‘Oh my God, I’m going to work for Martin Scorsese today’. So even if you have been ‘Oscared’, the buzz of that doesn’t go away.”

Bruce Willis, Demi Moore and Shannon Stone are all referred to in the diaries. I ask if he is worried that they will take offence. “God, I don’t know. I have been as honest as I am libelly (sic) allowed about who I have worked with and about myself. Steve Martin was the first person I gave it to, to read, and he can’t see that people would take offense. Vanity Fair has printed the chapter on Hudson Hawk and nobody has sent around any bodyguards yet!” Hudson Hawk saw Grant play the role of Darwin Mayflower alongside a cast including Bruce Willis and Andie MacDowell. The film bombed at the box office, being voted Turkey of the Year by the Alternative Academy.

Even though Grant is on first name terms with the Hollywood elite, he is clearly not affected and keeps his feet planted on the ground. “I’ve been offered a five year contract to do a television series for the American version of Men Behaving Badly but the idea of spending seven months of the year there, playing the same character would drive me insane. Plus the fact that my wife has a successful career in London as a dialect coach, my daughter still at school and all my friends are here.”

Born in 1957, Grant grew up in Swaziland and attended Cape Town University. He credits one of his mentors as a local architect who directed plays in his local theatre club and also possessed a hugs collection of plays as well as being a subscriber to Plays and Player!

“Plays and Players” was practically the lifeline into the African countryside where I lived. I learnt off by heart castlists of everything which was on in London, not realizing that by the time the magazine reached me the play was probably off already. I remember seeing the Glasgow Citizens Theatre adverts which were full pages in the seventies and they were so visually arresting that I made it my mission to get into Glasgow Citizens.” Coming to England in 1982, he auditioned for the theatre the very first week of his arrival. “A five am morning call at the Roundhouse went on for three weeks and after several rounds there were 12 of us left but, in the end, I didn’t make it and got a letter saying come back next year.” His face drops as he remembers the disappointment. “I couldn’t get out of bed for two days.” He then followed the traditional route that actors follow whilst awaiting a break, He tried his hand ay painting and decorating and waiting in tables whilst working in fringe and rep. Grant made his debut in 1985 in Les Blairs’ Honest, Descent and True, a made-for-tv film about advertising. Then came the life changing role of Withnail. Set in 1969, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical account of his life saw Grant and Paul McGann immortalize the two desperate dropouts floating through life in a haze of drugs and booze accompanies by the majestic strains of Jimi Hendrix.

What were the influences for creating Withnail? “I had lived in student digs at University. I couldn’t cook (still the case today!) and there was much raging about being unemployed and feeding the world so it wasn’t something entirely foreign for me.”

Considering that Withnail is drunk for practically the entirety of the film, how difficult was it to play such a convincing drunk? “Blow your eyes,” he says laughingly. “I’ve just been around enough drunks and so it’s easy to take on the characteristics – almost drunk by osmosis really.” Grant doesn’t drink or smoke. Does he get cross when people continually drew parallels with him and the character? I’ve been in situations where people have offered me drinks assuming that a public face saying I don’t drink is bullshit. They are surprised when they learn that I actually don’t drink.” He takes it all in stride but the articulate Grant has even been asked to speak at Oxford and Eton as the film has become a student cult. Earlier this year, the wine merchants Oddbins started a promotion linked to the film by using the line “The finest wines available to humanity.”

Does he prefer working in film and TV to treading the boards? “I got very badly burnt being in The Importance Of Being Earnest three years ago and the experience of that was such an unhappy one that I’m loathe to do it again. There’s always an inbuilt suspicion of people who are in film and TV and then go into theatre. There’s always an element of ‘well can you really do it?'”

The film work is more than enough to keep him busy at the moment. He recently appeared in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke on TV. In September, he will be seen in Portrait of a Lady by Jane Campion whom he describes as a genius and he just completed the filming of Twelfth Nigh by Trevor Nunn which is due out later in the year.

He is about to start working on a film entitled One Golden Afternoon, which is based on a true story about children who took photographs of fairies at the turn of the century and 70 years later they were revealed to be fakes. His eyes light up at the prospect of this “absolutely wonderful story.”

With such a busy schedule, I ask if he finds any time at all for hobbies and learn that he is a keen photographer, scuba diver and like to spend time with his daughter, building dolls’ houses! For an actor who has played such an oddity of roles, what type of role would he like to seem next on the horizon? “Hopefully something that wouldn’t be a repetition of what I have done before. That’s the criteria. I don’t honestly have a hit list of what I would like to play. Life doesn’t work like that in my experience, so whatever comes really.”

With that remark still hanging in the air he breaks into a beaming smile, wishes me luck and dashes off for his next appointment. Judging on the originality and eccentricity of the roles offered so far in him career, Richard E Grant is right to keep an open mind.

Plays and Players – MAY 1996

UK Time Out Magazine – 8th May, 1996

By Steve Grant

Photography by Gavin Evans

Richard E Grant hasn’t looked back since he landed the part of an out-of-work, alcoholic actor in “Withnail & I” – until now, that is. His new book, “With Nails”, records his frank feelings about the parts he won and the stars he worked with in the decade since that cult classic. I’ve always divided waiters into two categories: those who would piss in the soup and those who wouldn’t. Judging by his performance in “Withnail & I”, Bruce Robinson’s cult classic and the only film to celebrate and capture the happy chaos of the very late ‘60s, I would have had Richard E Grant down as one of the former. It’s a judgment not made easier by the knowledge that Grant did a stint as a table-hop in the early ‘80s when he arrived from his colonial home in Swaziland without a contact in the world. It was in Tuttons, a Covent Garden eatery then popular with Time Out staff. As it turns out, Grant says that he was one of the most highly prized of the expat pack: ‘I didn’t drink, I didn’t steal, and I was never late.’ In fact, after an hour or so in his company, it’s obvious that Grant is as likely to snarl at the customers or jerk off into the yogurt dip as Demi Moore is to take you ‘out the back’ at Planet Hollywood.

Grant’s film diaries, “With Nails”, are due out this month after Picador won a phone-bidding deal. Beginning at the time of “Withnail & I” and taking in films like the disastrous “Hudson Hawk”, the model-strewn “Pret-a-Porter” and the ambitious “Henry & June”, Grant’s diaries are a people-packed guide to the process of film-making, although both editors and lawyers have cut down the original 200,000 words by half.

He’s been keeping busy; he was recording a rap version of “Hamlet” when I caught up with him, and as well as appearing in Dennis Potter’s “Karaoke” he’s just finished in the Jane Campion film of Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady” and the Trevor Nunn’s cinema version of “Twelfth Night”, in which he plays Malvolio. It’s a truism, but one which Grant reiterates in print, that ‘almost without exception, every part I’ve been offered would result from me playing an out-of-work alcoholic actor’. These offers have included work with directors of the caliber of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola and Philip Kaufman, but Grant is unhesitating when asked who is his favourite: ‘Jane Campion, the most awesome 360-degree intellectual I’ve ever worked with, someone who takes film-making to the absolute limits, every day and with every shot.’

The actor ruefully quotes Alan Bennett’s remark that any kind of writing is an act of betrayal. He’s not talking about the showbiz stuff now, which is never really spiteful or sensational, but about genuinely painful moments in his personal life, the daughter who died shortly after being born, of the premature and painful death of his father from lung cancer. Grant’s luck in getting the part of Withnail is legendary: Daniel Day Lewis turned it down, something Grant was able to thank him for when they worked together on “The Age of Innocence”; Kenneth Branagh and Tim Roth, among others, were up for it, and Robinson was only convinced about the unknown and skinny Grant when the actor gave a perfect delivery of two words: ‘Fork it!’

Now “Withnail” has a shelf-life of its own, recently re-released both in the cinema and on video, and a key film in the development of people who were as young as eight when it was released in 1986. Grant’s even spoken on the subject at Eton and the Oxford Union. He seems genuinely perplexed by how the two experiences, the loss of the baby and the gaining of the part that was to make him, happened almost concurrently. His reaction to the latter is thus: ‘Right now, I could happily convert to Catholicism, the Ayatollah, Dalai Lama, Jehovah’s Witnoids, you choose the denomination – I am obeisant. I have a bone-deep conviction that this is the BREAK. I suspect this sure, centered sense of something happens rarely and some part of me is grateful that I am conscious of it now.’

But the description of the death of the child who, he politely corrects me, is not stillborn, but lived for half an hour, is devastating: ‘She is handed to my stricken wife first, and had I all the powers of Mars and miracles I would give this child life. And I don’t know for how long, my baby is put in my arms. Hand. For she is the size of a little bird. She is warm but dead. And PERFECT. Ten toes, ten fingers. Eyes, mouth, all. Broken. No breath. Our hearts are broken and will we ever cease weeping.’

Grant can’t way to this day whether one experience helped the other, one of the awful moral realities that actors have to deal with: he certainly didn’t need any help with the tearful last scene in which he quotes Hamlet as Paul McGann’s ‘I’ goes off to fame and the ‘70s. It’s one of the many ironies of the film that Grant is an avowed anti-smoker, especially after what cigarettes did to his father, and someone who physically can’t tolerate drink in large quantities. When he drank lighter fuel, Robinson conned him by filling the can with a particularly foul brand of vinegar. It was part revenge because all the avowed chain-smokers among the crew were gagging on Grant’s honey-flavoured herbal smokes! He sometimes makes apologetic remarks about his cosy ‘middle-class’ existence, his 13-year relationship with Joan and his doting love for his young daughter Olivia, as well as his abstemiousness. But dull he certainly ain’t’: what Grant does possess is obvious domestic happiness, carefully practiced char, and good manners, the latter being one of the things that his father instilled in him. ‘He told me that life would be easier if I developed a belief in good manners, a consideration for others, and it’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever had.’

He says that his parents’ break-up affected him tremendously. Didn’t he get constant come-ons from women, or indeed, from men? ‘Well, I think that children who come from broken homes get affected in different ways. They either become rampantly promiscuous or innately monogamous, and I’ve always been in the latter category; I’ve always had long relationships with the one person. I’m also a terrible liar, so I find it hard to take flirtation beyond the chat-up level, and of course as I spend almost all my non-working life with my wife and/or my daughter I tend rather to avoid temptation. They really are the focus of my life. But, that said, tomorrow she could get up and leave me for a bullfighter’ What would he do then? ‘I’d probably end up stabbing both of them.’

Grant describes himself as ‘the stalker of his own life’ and is certainly a fine conversationalist; when I ask him whether he can avoid being over-protective about his daughter, who will be an only child because Grant and Joan dread the problems of sibling rivalry, he comes out with the elegant: ‘Between the theory and the practice falls the shadow.’ His book will no doubt intrigue, and is full of good-nature stories about the likes of Madonna, Uma Thurman (‘as potent a delight as my first every sighting of Monroe’), Kate Moss and Johnny Depp, Gary Oldman and Hugh Grant, whose ‘Weddings’-style comic banter is cleverly recreated. He admits to finding Hugh’s recent spot of blow-job other ‘hilarious and no surprise to those who know him well’. Because he’s accident prone? ‘No, because he’s lecherous. Anyway, it’s completely relaunched his career.’

So far, he says, only Barbara Hershey has told him to keep any remarks she makes to him in future ‘off the record’, nor is there too much danger that he won’t work again. He says that writing has come naturally since his adolescence: ‘As I grew up in the colonies I had to face the fact that any friendships I had would be finished as soon as that person’s family were transferred elsewhere, so I developed the habit of writing long letters as compensation.’

If ‘With Nails’ confirms anything, it’s that acting is primarily a matter of good writing, but that it’s often pot luck as to whether a film will be a smash hit or a turkey. Grant says that even though he is often “Withnailed’ in the street by people screaming out ‘scrubbers’, he has also been followed about by groups of people who think that the fiasco, ‘Hudson Hawk’, was a masterpiece! ‘I met Lily Savage at a function the other night and he said that “Killing Dad” was one of his favourite films and he played it over and over again. I mean, God, can you believe it!? I think you can never tell how something will seem after it’s been intercepted by all those antennae out there.’

Vanity Fair Magazine – April 1996

“I love it when Kevin Spacey says, “It was Keyser Soze,” in The Usual Suspects, it was just brilliant,” says actor Richard E. Grant, who has played a dyspeptic conniver in Withnail and I, a bitchy, S&M alchemist in Hudson Hawk, an obsessed screenwriter in Robert Altman’s The Player, and a gossipy fop in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. Grant chronicles his experiences in his forthcoming film diary, With Nails, excerpted on page 186 and due out from Picador next month in the U.K.