As I drive towards the Petersham hotel in Richmond, up a long, steep hill surrounded by meadows, I spot a tall, fashionably dressed man of a certain age lolloping at speed along the narrow pavement. It’s my date, Richard E Grant.
The actor walks into the lobby a few minutes later. “Would you like a seat in the restaurant or the private room?” the concierge asks. “The private room,” Grant says, his voice posh and throaty, his manner guarded.
He sits on an armchair and crosses his long legs. “So,” he starts, his unflinching blue eyes examining me warily. Is he readying himself for battle? Probably boredom. Promoting yet another movie in a career still going gangbusters 40 years on must be stultifyingly dull, plus he has just got off the red-eye from New York.
Grant, 67, makes for a curious interviewee, one who will mask his vulnerability (his childhood was far from easy and he lost his beloved wife, the voice coach Joan Washington, with whom he had a daughter, Olivia, 36, to cancer in 2021, after 38 years together) with old-school reserve and biting humour. He reminds me of the paterfamilias he played in Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s coruscatingly brilliant satire.
He met Washington at a voice coaching lesson when he needed help with a Northern Irish accent. They went home together that night. “The conversation that began in bed in January 1983,” he says, “ended in bed as we held each other’s hands, still talking, on Thursday the 2nd of September, 2021. We never stopped, we covered everything from Tolstoy to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Talking is the greatest intimacy of all.” I wonder if this is why, for every question I ask him over the next two hours, he will respond by firing the very same one back at me. Why do you do that? Actors never ask journalists questions. “Well, it would be rude not to,” he answers, affronted. You should tell that to your fellow thespians, I say.
We are meeting to discuss his latest movie, Death of a Unicorn, a fantasy comedy noir about a longevity-obsessed billionaire (played by Grant), his family, a battery of disgruntled household staff, a hapless visiting employee and his daughter, and, you guessed it, a unicorn or two. It’s a tightly wrought, pacey and joyously comedic romp. The ensemble cast includes Will Poulter, who plays Grant’s entitled and idiotic drug-taking son to hilarious perfection, Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega (the visitors), and Téa Leoni as the matriarch.
Grant has just been to Austin, Texas, for its first American screening at the SXSW festival, where films are shown not to the industry but to the paying public. “There were 2,000 people in the audience, and they laughed and cheered.” He seems surprised. “I hadn’t been in a cinema for a long time. It reminded me how people in a crowd give you licence to laugh. It’s important to go to the movies.”
His acting career took off when he appeared in 1987’s era-defining cult classic Withnail & I. Does he ever rewatch it? “The last time I saw it was a rough cut in 1987. I offered to return the £20,000 fee because I thought I’d ruined the film.” He has since appeared in more than 70 films, including notably How to Get Ahead in Advertising; LA Story (alongside his great friend Steve Martin); Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence; Spice World; Robert Altman’s fashion world pastiche, Prêt-à-Porter; and 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe. He wrote and directed the film Wah-Wah, loosely based on his upbringing, and has also starred in countless plays and TV shows such as Downton Abbey, Girls, Frasier, Game of Thrones and Doctor Who.
He was born in May 1957 in Swaziland (now called Eswatini), at the time a British protectorate. His birth name is Richard Grant Esterhuysen and he has English, Dutch-Afrikaner and German ancestry. “I grew up in a hermetically sealed colonial bubble,” he says. “My father was director of education by day and a raging alcoholic by night. Booze, bonking and boredom, that’s how everybody lived.”
The bonking he is referring to is a dig at his mother. He was ten, sleeping in the back of his parent’s car on the way back from a cricket match, when he was awoken by the sound of his mother and his father’s best friend having sex in the front seats. His mother left home soon after. He has kept a diary ever since.
Then when he was 15 his father caught him emptying whisky bottles down the kitchen sink. He pointed a gun at his son’s head and told him he was going to blow his brains out. Luckily he missed because he was so drunk. Grant also has a younger brother, Stuart, from whom he is estranged. How come? “We have nothing in common,” he replies.
Grant knew from the age of seven that he wanted to be an actor. “It chooses you,” he says. His father told him he wouldn’t pay for him to go to drama school because “99 per cent of actors are unemployed”.
Shortly after finishing secondary school he went to study English at the University of Cape Town, which had a drama school attached to it. It was a different universe to the one he’d grown up in. “Swaziland was multiracial, but in South Africa there was a divide. You could work together in the theatre but you couldn’t live together or go to the same school. If any black actors came to stay, the neighbours reported us.”
He emigrated to England at 25 to pursue acting. Before he left his acting teacher at Cape Town told him: “You have the talent to make it as a writer/director, but I think you’re frankly too weird-looking, like an undertaker’s assistant with a long face, to make it as an actor.”
Has he ever played an undertaker? “Not yet. But every single review after Withnail came out said I was bug-eyed, lantern-jawed and slab-faced.” Did it affect him? “No, because I know what I look like. I always say, if someone were to play me in a movie, it would be Boris Karloff” — the British actor who gained fame in the 1931 film Frankenstein.
This combative side to Grant, taking himself down, is perhaps a reflexive deflection. “You get used to dealing with rejection as an actor,” he says, brushing it off. So there’s no stab of jealousy when someone else gets a role you’re vying for? “I was sitting next to Olivia Colman at Stella McCartney’s afterparty during Paris Fashion Week a few weeks ago, and I asked her what she was up to. She told me she’s playing Mrs Bennet in a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I’ve always wanted to play Mr Bennet but because I’d already appeared in Persuasion I was ruled out.” He pauses. “So there you go, you talk about a little stab, it’s just disappointment.”
Has he ever gone into therapy? As ever he doesn’t prevaricate. “I had psychoanalysis for 18 months when I was 40.” Why only then? “I thought my career was over. This brilliant therapist, Christopher Bollas, said to me, ‘You are mirroring what happened to your father. He was cuckolded at 40 and his job was in jeopardy because Swaziland was becoming an independent nation. You were ten at the time and subconsciously you’ve hit a wall now because you’ve got a child of the same age.’ ” He advised Grant to make up with his mother. “I spent ten months trying to talk to her and she apologised. As a middle-aged man I understood what I couldn’t as a child.” Did it help? “It changed my life.”
He then turns to me and asks: “Have you had therapy?” I decide to let that one slip.
We talk about ageing and how it feels. He asks me how I deal with it. I tell him I don’t have anything done and have always naturally gravitated towards younger people. “So you’re a vampire then,” he says.
Grant found out as a teen that he was allergic to alcohol. What’s it like going out sober? “What you don’t know you don’t miss. I never get a hangover.” So what does he do for fun, does he like music? “I love everything except for hip-hop, the ‘I’m going to f*** you up the ass’ kind of misogynistic crap.”
So he doesn’t drink, and he has already told me he doesn’t do drugs; he must have an addiction to something. “Yes, I like dead people’s things, the sort you find in junk shops. Especially oversized things.” He spends his weekends in the Cotswolds, where he has a cottage, and loves going shopping. “I was seated next to someone at a dinner in Gloucestershire three years ago and she saw me smelling the furniture, the tablecloth, and turning the plates upside down. She turned to me and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got this really badly, haven’t you?’ I asked her what she was talking about, and she said, ‘You’re addicted to stuff — it’s more addictive than heroin. I’ve got it too.’ I asked her what her name was and she said, ‘Cath Kidston.’”
What does his house look like, then? “It’s maximalist from floor to ceiling, there’s stuff everywhere in every colour.”
• Richard E Grant: My lifelong infatuation with Barbra Streisand
His head is starting to loll to one side and his eyes look sleepy, but he soldiers on. “I was in Lamu [in Kenya],” he says. How come, I ask? “I was on holiday with Charlotte Tilbury because I did her Christmas ad campaign. She said, ‘I’m taking a bunch of people, will you come?’ She knows I’m always the first on the dancefloor. I’m unstoppable. I earned my holiday spurs with her — we danced every night.”
His recent turn on the Burberry catwalk also made quite a splash. “I was astonished to be asked at my age. I’ve never done it before. Everyone else was 20 years old, except for Jason Isaacs, Lesley Manville and Elizabeth McGovern.” He seems fond of fashion. Today he’s wearing “a Ralph Lauren poloneck, Zara trousers and Doc Martens”, he says as he lifts his feet on to a side table to show me. “And my peacoat is Burberry.” He’s also wearing two watches: a Cartier and a Breitling, as is his foible.
There’s one question I have hesitated to ask. Will he ever date again following the death of his beloved wife? “I haven’t really thought about it,” he replies. “The idea of being sixty-seven and three quarters and taking my kit off is so mortifying, I’d have to be in a Krakatoan cave without a crack of light.” He looks pensive for a moment. “That may change. I’m hopeful-minded and open-hearted but I’m not looking for it.”
The good news is he has a full social calendar. “I’ve got ten people coming for dinner tomorrow night,” he says. Are you cooking? “Who else is going to cook?” He says he doesn’t feel lonely because his daughter and her husband live with him. They came to stay during Covid and never left. “But I’m used to being on my own because I’ve spent so many years on location. I don’t have an issue with that.” Instead he comforts himself by writing to his wife every night to tell her about his day and who he has met. What will tonight’s account say, I ask. He bursts out laughing.
He sits up and clears his throat as if he’s about to perform at the Old Vic. “Astonishingly,” he begins, “the journalist was 4ft 11in.” I stop him right there. I’m 5ft 1in. “She’s 5ft 1in. Her face looks like a roadmap because she had head and neck cancer 14 years ago, which she luckily survived, but because of it she’s not allowed to have plastic surgery. All her girlfriends now look 40 years old but her jawline is hanging around her knees and in ten years she will tie a bow with her dyed hair around her chin in a tight knot and she’ll look like the Queen at Balmoral.”
Ouch.
Death of a Unicorn is in cinemas now
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Styling Heathermary Jackson. Grooming Laila Hayani at Forward Artists. Local production Urban NYC. Thanks to Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre and City Parks Foundation, and Central Park Conservancy
