A QUICK WORD

The legendary British actor on Bondi, mini burgers at the Oscars and playing a drag queen.

Richard E. Grant.

Growing up, our food was very regimented and unadventurous… roast chicken, roast lamb, roast beef, and fish on a Friday.

I’d never eaten spaghetti or seen a pizza till I was 17 years old. Food revolution! You discover Italian food and you never go back.

When I was doing My Fair Lady for Opera Australia in 2008 I stayed at Ravesis in Bondi.

All the cast said to me: “Why do you want to live in Bondi?” They thought it was a bit daggy. I thought it was absolutely amazing that I could run on that mile-long beach every day and go in the water. My most memorable meals, combined with the friends that I made there, were at Sean’s Panaroma. That was like my canteen, that’s where I went all the time. Also the Sydney Fish Market was brilliant. You could buy a lobster takeaway, like you’d gone into a McDonald’s.

Skye Gyngell used to cook at a restaurant that was right next door to my house and she’s now opened Spring in the middle of London.

She is the greatest chef that matches my taste sensibilities. I’ve got all her cookbooks. One of my favourite restaurant meals was cooked by Skye: a crab starter, followed by beef with Café de Paris butter, and she makes bread out of porridge, which is absolutely extraordinary, and a lemon tart to finish. Historically good.

Cheese and chocolate are my absolute nightmares.

If someone gave them to me as my last meal, I’d starve. I ate dinner the other night with people I had never eaten with before, and my wife had to explain to them why I left the table when the cheese came out. I find it absolutely disgusting; the smell, the taste… I love Christmas pudding. I ration myself to eat those once a month. They’re so rich and delicious. But I know that many people loathe them. It’s the same feeling I have towards cheese.

I was eating in an Italian restaurant called Mediterraneo [in Notting Hill], just three blocks away from a bedsit that I had rented for £30 a week when I emigrated:

it felt like full circle, having lunch there with my daughter when I found out that I had got an Oscar nomination [for Can You Ever Forgive

Me?]. It was such an extraordinary, out-of-body experience, I was very grateful to be eating linguine at the time!

Food was the thing that grounded us on the day of the Oscars… I called up Melissa McCarthy and I said, “This whole experience is so unreal, and we’ve been on this press go-round like hamsters for six months.

If I bring all the ingredients, can I come and cook breakfast at your house?” So I went round there, and I jumped on her trampoline and I cooked [eggs]. It was a way of trying to normalise what was a completely abnormal experience.

The ceremony takes hours, so by the time you get food it’s late.

At the Vanity Fair party they had mini hamburgers and I ate about 16 of those. And then I went to a party that Olivia Colman and Amy Adams had organised at Bette Davis’ old house. They had karaoke and to my endless embarrassment, according to my daughter, I sang David Bowie’s Life on Mars. I didn’t sleep at all that night… I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Jonathan Butterell, the director of

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, took the chance of casting me as a drag queen, despite my saying I’d never seen drag.

How can I do it? Why don’t you cast a real drag artist? But he said no, you’re the person I want to play the part.

I binge-watched 11 seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race in three weeks…

The verbal banter is so sharp. I’ve been around actors who can dish the dirt, but they’re amateurs compared to what the drag queens get up to. And I realised that they have to use their verbal skills to protect themselves. That was a real eyeopener. I’m currently watching RuPaul’s Drag Race Down

Under. Karen from Finance! Really, really funny.

Once you’ve got all that gear on you do feel so empowered.

I was about six foot seven inches with the hair and the heels… Open-toe high-heel sandals in tights is preferable to wearing Jimmy Choos, which are literally torture. I don’t know how anybody could pay that amount of money to be that uncomfortable. It defeats me. If I was a girl, I would only be in flats at all times. ●

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie premieres on Amazon Prime Video from September 17.

I love Christmas pudding. I ration myself to eat those once a month. They’re so delicious.