Graham’s guests: The inside story
Robert De Niro
“He’s not a storyteller or very verbal. He’s a benign presence. Last time he started telling a story he went on and on. We were all leaning in, willing it to be amazing . . . Then he finally went, ‘Why am I telling this?’ Nobody had an answer. We cut it.”
Tom Cruise
“He is incredible. He comes in and gets introduced to everyone, as happens with every guest, and he remembers everyone’s name. Clearly, that is some sort of mental trick, but it’s a very impressive one. That means people backstage love him.”
Helen Mirren
“She makes people on the couch better. I don’t know what it is. I think it’s because she’s interested. So they’ll start telling a story and she’ll turn and gaze, and they’ll up their game, ‘because Dame Helen is actually listening to me, I’d better up my story’.”
Warren Beatty
“He asked to meet me the day before, so I went along and he told me all these incredibly scurrilous Hollywood stories, although every one began with: ‘Of course, I won’t tell this story on the show.’”
Jennifer Lawrence
“People have to be so careful. Poor old Jennifer Lawrence. Every time she comes on, she just says something, and for some reason she gets in such trouble and has to apologise to the people of Hawaii. She’s being held up to this ridiculous standard.”
Alan Sugar
“When Alan Sugar and Pamela Stephenson [the psychotherapist and wife of Billy Connolly] were on, Alan didn’t have much time for Pamela’s therapy. I think he called her a ‘quack’. How do you rescue that?”
As told in previous interviews.