‘I was not short of amoral role models…’

For his best role in decades, as a forger’s right-hand man, Richard E Grant didn’t have to look far for inspiration

Manhattan,” he says, “and we started shooting on the Monday.” His rehearsal time amounted to a lunch with McCarthy and the director, Marielle Heller, and half a day’s sussing out scenes: “And I had to beg Marielle for that. Originally Melissa was just coming in from LA for a costume fitting.”

Grant’s account of his casting in Can You Ever Forgive Me? frames it as a punchline in a farce – or perhaps the middle stretch of a belated sequel to Withnail and I, in which his hapless resting actor character ends up in contention for an Academy Award, rather than on holiday, by mistake. But first choice or not, he was a good one. His performance – impish, shabby, bitingly tragic – is his best-received since Withnail, and has already led to his first Golden Globe and Bafta nominations in a near four-decade career, with the equivalent Oscar nod widely expected to follow on Tuesday.

Yet Grant, 61, still carries himself like an intruder. We meet at Claridge’s before the nominations are announced, during a day off from shooting the latest Star Wars film, in which he plays an as-yetundisclosed role. Again, he describes the experience of landing the part as if it were the result of an administrative hiccup.

“I got 10 pages of script from a Forties British war film, three scenes in total, and had to video myself doing them on an iPad.

Then you send it off, and feel like you’re never going to hear anything about it ever again. I got a call two months later to say a car was going to pick me up and take me to Pinewood Studios to meet the director, JJ Abrams. Which was odd, because I still had no idea