TOTAL FILM INTERVIEW
Still beloved for his role in Withnail & I, Richard E. Grant has been on enviable form of late, landing awards nominations and bagging roles in huge franchises. Ahead of the “terror” of his latest role as a drag queen in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, h
Richard E. Grant on drag, Withnail and Loki.
IRONICALLY, PLAYING AN OUT-OF-WORK ACTOR IN WITHNAIL LED TO EVERY SINGLE JOB I’VE HAD SUBSEQUENTLY
Can you take a one-second pause? I just have to answer this.” Richard E. Grant’s mobile has started ringing in the middle of our interview. He returns just a moment later. “I’ve just had a call saying I’m going to be arrested for tax evasion. It must be a scam, right? I thought it was a number I recognised. Sorry about that. If you ever hear about me in jail, you can say, ‘Yeah, I was there when he got the phone call.’”
It’s December 2020, and we’re chatting over Zoom. Thankfully, the intervening months haven’t seen the beloved 64-yearold Brit arrested for tax evasion; the only thing he’s guilty of stealing since then are scenes out from under his co-stars, in MCU series Loki and the upcoming Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, the musical adaptation that’s the starting point for our chat.
Dressed in a checked jacket, his neck snug with a brown paisley scarf, Grant is a natural raconteur, generous with an anecdote, and refusing to pull punches. True to the impression he gave on social media when he was doing the awards circuit for his frequently nominated turn in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, he seems genuinely surprised that his career has been going so long, seemingly still powered by the cult following of the ever-quotable Withnail & I. It was his first film, and he starred as the perpetually sozzled out-ofwork actor of the title.
Grant doesn’t begrudge its popularity, acknowledging its ongoing importance in his success. “I have no problem with it whatsoever,” he smiles. “It’s the only script I can ever remember, and I found it genuinely funny, and it’s so true to what being an out-of-work actor is, that it would be churlish to deny its longevity or effect on my life.”
It led to work with great auteurs, and a consistent supply of roles over the coming decades. As a kid who grew up in Swaziland (now Eswatini) in Southern Africa – he reflected on his youth in the semiautobiographical Wah-Wah, his only film to date as writer/director – Grant moved through the industry perpetually starstruck, but he can’t quite accept having that reciprocated. “I just can’t get my head around that people could feel the same way [about me] that I do about other people.”
The likelihood of people being starstruck by Grant has soared in recent years, with roles in huge franchise properties like Star Wars, Game Of Thrones, Logan, and most recently, Loki. But he’s not shying away from a challenge. In Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, he plays Hugo Battersby and alter ego Loco Chanelle, an ageing drag queen who becomes something of a mentor figure for young Jamie (Max Harwood). “I don’t usually get asked to do things with accents,” he ponders. “So to be cast as a working-class, Sheffield drag artist... just saying that sentence fills me with a kind of, ‘Aargh!’”
With the battery on his iPad running low, it’s time to get started on a chat that’s anything but a drag…
Was Everybody’s Talking About Jamie your first experience of the drag world?
Yeah, apart from seeing Dame Edna Everage – who is a female impersonator rather than a drag artist, so I’ve been told. So I bingewatched, in three weeks, 11 seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s extraordinary. Nothing can prepare you for just the sheer chutzpah and courage that it obviously takes for these people to defy family resistance, especially their fathers, and to invent and take on these drag personas, and then have to deal with the competition level, and the bitchery that goes on backstage, which was eye-watering, but was the best preparation I could have had for playing Hugo.
Was that the big appeal when it came your way?
The appeal was the terror of never having done it before. I was 62 at that point, and I thought, ‘The chances to be offered something like this [are] so few and far between.’ Being terrified of doing something, as painful as it was in the beginning, is always a good way of going to do a part, I think.
What was more daunting about playing Hugo/Loco: the Sheffield accent or the drag performance?
The combination of doing a Sheffield accent and drag in was a terror rocket that got me levitating in the middle of the night.
Is this your first experience of performing in a musical?
I’d done My Fair Lady at the Sydney Opera House playing Higgins, and 10 years later at the Chicago Opera House. But because it was written for Rex Harrison, who wasn’t a singer, it was like speak-singing, as he called it. So it wasn’t like what I was asked to do in this. I felt like one of those old racing cars that turns up, and 20 people come and change the tyres, and put in the oil, and put in the fuel, and do all of that. So I had a dance teacher; a singing teacher, Anne-Marie Speed; makeup and hair; a wig person. Every single department I could plea for help from, I got, to create this almost 7ft-tall drag persona. I owe it all to other people’s handiwork.
Jamie’s told to stop dreaming and get real. Did you ever face anything similar when your career ambitions began?