“In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast” features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and Awards Editor Jack Smart for this guide on how to live the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
How many actors can claim they launched a thriving screen career by playing a washed-up, unemployed actor? That distinction belongs to Richard E. Grant, whose road from the eternally inebriated title role in cult classic “Withnail and I” to an award-winning oeuvre began, he tells Backstage, with a “fuck you” attitude.
Growing up in the Protectorate of Swaziland (now Eswatini), Grant performed on various stages and put on puppet shows, and remembers being “mostly just humored and derided and not really taken very seriously. Which is the best preparations you can have! Because being told ‘no,’ and having that sort of tattooed invisibly on your head, I think you inadvertently develop a kind of, ‘Fuck you, well I’m going to have a go at this.’
“Certainly to my parents and the people that I was at school with,” he adds, “saying that you want to be a professional actor was as ludicrous as saying you wanted to fly to the moon—which in 1969 they did, when I was 12 years old. I said, ‘You see, they got to the moon! I can try to become an actor.’ ”
After studying at the University of Cape Town and working at fringe theaters in South Africa and then England, Grant landed Bruce Robinson’s “Withnail and I” thanks to casting director Mary Selway, who had seen him opposite Gary Oldman in an improvised TV film. He began amassing onscreen credits in the U.K. and Hollywood, collaborating with Steve Martin (“L.A. Story”), Robert Altman (“The Player”), Winona Ryder and Francis Ford Coppola (“Dracula”), Martin Scorsese (“The Age of Innocence”), Julian Fellowes (“Gosford Park” and later “Downton Abbey”), and more.
Throughout it all, the likes of Robin Williams and Sean Penn would approach him, quoting his lines from “Withnail”—even if they didn’t know his name. “Having played an unemployed actor, it’s led to all my subsequent employment,” Grant says. “My mantra for surviving this career is, never give up. If you feel that it is something that you’re compelled to do, you will know that. And if it’s not, then don’t waste your time and energy because there are too many people that want it more than you do.”
Grant also wrote and directed the semi-autobiographical film “Wah-Wah,” starred in “Spice World,” “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Game of Thrones,” and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” and earned an Academy Award nomination for Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” opposite Melissa McCarthy. This year, he’s appeared on the Disney+ series “Loki” and Amazon Studios’ long-awaited adaptation of the stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” from writers Dan Gillespie Sells and Tom MacRae and director Jonathan Butterell.
As both disheveled shop owner Hugo Battersby and vibrant drag queen Loco Chanelle in “Jamie,” Grant combines his lifelong affinity for Barbra Streisand’s musical skill with comprehensive research, including working with English drag artist David Hoyle and watching over 10 seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“I thought, well, you can’t go half-measure if you’re playing somebody who is a drag queen,” Grant says, describing the transformative effects of drag and how that informs the character-building process. “It’s confidence. That’s what it comes down to.... You’ve got heels that can kick somebody’s ass. And you get a bit of sass going, you’ve got a cinched-in waist. An extraordinary sort of thing happens, that it’s not only you who feel transformed, but it’s how other people react to you.”
Max Harwood’s Ascent to ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ Is the Year’s Best Cinderella Story Other tools in Grant’s acting arsenal: establishing a character’s scent, and identifying the details of their sex life. “It’s the same thing when I meet anybody in real life, I wonder, what kind of sex do they have? Because I think that that is the key to everything about everybody. Because it’s the part that is either the most concealed or the most obvious. How somebody fucks somebody else, or wants to, is going to guide their most primal behavior.”
Listen to Grant’s “In the Envelope” interview, full of advice on everything from auditioning to playing drunk, at any of the links below.
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