S8, Ep6: Richard E Grant, actor

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Hello there, before we start I wanted to let you know that this episode contains some swearing and themes that may not be appropriate for all listeners. I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled up on the sofa. Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:53Hello everybody. Now, my guest today is the actor Richard E. Grant. I know, I know. What would you wear to meet one of the most successful and enduring film stars of the last 40 years? Now, one thing's for sure, it's going to start with a pair of thick, black, opaque tights. because the day has finally come in the calendar when you can get back into your 60 deniers. Should be a national holiday this. Women should exchange cards around this time. Happy 60 denier day to one and all. Now, a man I feel sure will have worn a 60 denier at some point is Richard E. Grant. He's what I would like to call denier aware.

1:43raised under the African sun in Swaziland. His dream of acting brought him to the UK as a young man where he was cast aged 30 in the cult classic with Nell and I. Since then, he's not left our screens. He's starred in dozens of films and TV series from Gosford Park to Star Wars and from Game of Thrones to Saltburn. I think my favourite is the 1995 film Jack and Sarah. It is just a proper Sunday afternoon hug of a movie. His book, A Pocket Full of Happiness, was written after his wife of 38 years, Joan Washington, died in 2021. And at 67, his career is in full bloom. Now, I've heard this is a man with a few eccentricities when it comes to food, and I have many questions.

2:33Okay, I'm just looking at my phone. His taxi is half a mile away. He'll be here in a second. Play it cool, Grace, play it cool.

2:50Richard E. Grant. Yes, Grace Dent. Welcome to Comfort Eton. Welcome to our world. You've been acting for the best part of four decades. You have learned thousands of lines in your time. I'm now going to test you. I want to know if you can remember when you said this one. There's a famous saying, like schoolboys, reasonings are best enjoyed young. That was in a show with Arabella Weir called Posh Nosh. Yes. And there were 10-minute shorts made for the BBC sunning up all those cookery shows that proliferated in the early 2000s. You're absolutely right. 2003, you were playing the Honourable Simon Marchmont.

3:43You were a camp, upper-class TV chef. The moment you finished shows, do you just completely forget almost all of the lines? I think you forget all lines. Completely. I knew that when you said Riesling, I thought, well, there's not many things that I've mentioned, wine names, so it would have to be a cookery show. You did make a very, very good chef. thank you every time i invite a fabulous guest to join me on the show i ask them to bring their comfort food this is the metaphorical equivalent of clambering into bed it's the your agent has just called the afternoon's plans are cancelled right due to some kind of food poisoning you're high on council plans.

4:31You get into bed with this snack and it screams home. Do you want to show me under your tea towel, please? I will show you under my tea towel. It is Heinz baked beans. Old friend. On top of brown toast with Marmite underneath. Tell me about the baked beans. When did you first discover this was your snack of choice? I was given baked beans when I was a boy and then horrified my mother by putting marmite on top of the toast underneath the beans because I'm a salt addict and marmite as you know is very salty and then when I was a student then an acting student and then an out-of-work actor it's a kind of go-to meal that costs nothing and requires no cooking skill whatsoever other than opening the tin and heating it up and also you're also rewarded with the comical effects of the fart-a-thon that succeeded.

5:25Now, I don't think that baked beans are the worst for wind. So what is your top fart ingredient? That would be, thank you for asking, I was hoping that we'd get here. They used to have a thing between Lent and Ash Wednesday. All the northerners would eat this thing, Carlin's, and they used to call it Carlin's Sunday, and then everybody would say Farting Monday. And what is Carlin's? It's a bean. It's a bean. You soak them in water and then you add loads of butter and like bacon, right? The non-bean version is avocados and a handful of raisins. And within 10 minutes, you will be like a Suzuki motorbike convention leaving the pit stop.

6:15We've only just met and you've already started talking, lowering the tone, talking about gas. But the thing is, I think that you've just got that, you've just got a look in your eye that immediately just says, well, this is not a man to talk just about the weather with.

6:36I've done this podcast long enough to know that you can really get a sense of a person from understanding their food habits, their routines. Yeah. Let's start at the beginning of your day, the morning. Now, set the scene for me. are you a morning person and what do you do to kickstart the day? I have a bowl of porridge, which I hate because it keeps you going till about lunchtime. And I put it in water. Yeah. So I hate milk and boil that up. Oh my God. And then put as much fruit or cranberry juice or anything to disguise the fact and then basically glug it down in about four gulps. Right. Okay.

7:18It's revolting. Absolutely revolting. So how long have you eaten this porridge concoction? My late wife said that I had to eat breakfast. For 38 years of our marriage, I ate this concoction because she loved porridge. She thought that it was perfect as a last meal. I mean, have you ever thought about going absolutely mad and maybe buying sugar puffs? Uh, no, because they don't. I've tried sugar puffs, but they don't sustain you till lunchtime. You can't run for a couple of miles in the park in the morning on sugar puffs, in my experience. How do you manage to eat the porridge if you don't like it?

7:59Hold my nose closed like that, like a nose peg, and just plug it down. I tried coffee once in 1971 and spat that out. And I tried tea and spat that out as well. Hang on a minute. You don't drink hot drinks at all? No, I like iced things, even in the middle of the winter, of ice and everything. This feels like an interview for the insane asylum. You're trying to establish whether I should be taken away and strapped down. I think we've heard enough, yes. People in coats, bring in the van. Hot drinks. It's the cornerstone of British society. Like when you came in and you didn't want a hot drink, I was like, put what?

8:41Where are we going now? What are we going to give him? The porridge says a lot. It's very regimented. I think that often these rules are seeded in childhood. What were you eating as a child in Swaziland? The meals were because my mother hated cooking and we had a cook because it was colonial era. We had the same meal on a different day, week in, week out. Monday it would be roast chicken, Tuesday roast lamb, Wednesday roast beef, Thursday pork, Friday fish, Saturday barbecue. And that was it. There was no change. I saw spaghetti for the first time when I was 11 years old and was appalled because I thought that somebody was giving me a bowl of white worms.

9:25Who have very good teeth, strong bones and blue eyes. Was the chicken cooked in the same way every time? You were basically living the life of somebody in 1950s Hull or something like that. Exactly right. But in Swaziland. I've never been to Hull, but I take your word for it. The barbecue. Yeah. Now, see, that sounds like fun times. Was the barbecue fun? Was that where your family... Yes, it was, except that after my mother's adultery, and she went over my father's best friend, which I happened to witness in the back of a car inadvertently when I was 10. When my father found out and then my mother left, he then became a chronic alcoholic.

10:12So barbecue day meant that the drinking would begin at about noon. And then by three, four o 'clock, it was run for the hills because he had a real personality switch when he was from a very charming, loquacious, kind, and loving human being into Godzilla's brother. And the barbecue is like a beautiful cover, isn't it, for that? Because he's just, it's sociable. Yeah, you can invite everybody around and you could drink without any self-control. I mean, it does sound also like quite a typical British barbecue now. I mean, joking aside, people do get absolutely hammered here at barbecues. Like somebody always has to fall into a bush and somebody has to sleep with someone else's wife.

11:02if that's just the British barbecue. You know, I now have to go to Hull to find out my full cultural roots.

11:16I've heard you talk before about what happened with your mother. It feels like you've got humor and comedy when you talk about it, but it can't have been like that bloody time. Well, you have to, but when you're 10 and you don't really understand to what you've seen, but you know that it's something that you shouldn't have seen and that these two people shouldn't have been doing. I was asleep on the backseat of the car coming back from a cricket match. And all the adults had gone to the sports club afterwards to drink and have dinner on that. So every kid found a backseat to fall asleep on. So when you wake up and it feels like it's the middle of the night, there are no lights on of the house that you're supposed to have returned to or the town that you've gone through and the only lights are the headlamps of the car and the car is moving rhythmically, but the engine is off, you know that something is not right.

12:12And when the person in the front seat is not your father, snogging and doing the deed with your mum, then it's pretty unequivocal. Because you know that you're either not going to be believed or you can't tell anybody, writing it down was the way that I instinctively dealt with it, which is why I've been a diarist since I was 10 years old. Lord, if I write it down, then nobody can tell me that it didn't happen. My parents ran off with each other to be with each other and had me. You? Yeah. So you're a love child? Yeah. And I remember all of the drama around that and how people were behaving. But now I look back and I realize they were really young.

13:03They were in their 30s. Of course, I can forgive them. Do you know what I mean? I can forgive them now for the madness. Can you see that? Oh, yeah, no, I perfectly understand as, you know, now that I'm officially an old age at 67, that my mother fell out of love with my father and that you have no control over that. Okay, this sets off a chain of events. Your mum leaves. Yes. Your dad hits the ball and you run away. What made you go? I only ran away once when he, when I was 15, he got very violent towards my stepmother. and was trying to bash her up. She had locked herself in their bedroom at the end of a long corridor in our house.

13:51And I thought misguidedly that if I emptied all his Johnny Walker scotch down the drain in the scullery, then that would ease his drinking slightly. So I had got through, I was halfway through the 11th bottle down the sink and I felt something very cold on my neck. And it was a gun. and I ducked immediately, gun went off and then he chased me into the garden and then found me. And he was very drunk and very angry and he said he was going to blow my brains out. And I said, you know, go on, do it. Just end this misery of what we're all having to deal with. So he had a gun to my temple and then pulled the trigger.

14:33But because he was so unsteady, it missed. Otherwise I wouldn't be here. And then I ran away and I stayed with my piano teacher called Bunny Barnes, who was Scottish. And she was the one, she was a kind of substitute mentor mother figure in my childhood. And I stayed friends with her until she was 94, when she died in 2007. She knew what was going on because I told her at school. And she said, oh, you can stay here. And she said, what I'm going to do is extend your musical education. I said, oh, what's it going to mean? She said, well, I'm going to close the drapes and put on some Puccini, Madame Butterfly.

15:12So I got an intense musical education from my piano teacher. And she also gave me another invaluable lesson. She then taught me how to light a fart. No! Which was, you know, coming back to the beginning of our baked bean introduction, Grace Dent, that it has stood me in great stead. I don't have the paperwork from Health and Safety to allow you to light your own farts within Tom Fitton. It's one of the great party tricks of all time. If you want to win children over, it has been foolproof for me, I kid you not. Oh my God. When is the last time you entertained a group of people by lighting a fart?

15:52Last night. No.

15:58Did Bunny cook for you? Yeah, she cooked apple strudel. So I've loved apple strudel all my life. She was a very, very good cook. I love an apple strudel. It's very northern, isn't it? Yeah, I love dense, no-nonsense beige puddings. I think that you can't go wrong with the jam roly-poly, which is just suet and jam. Yeah. That kind of stuff that you eat and it just kind of insulates you from a northern winter. you left swaziland in 82 yes your dad had just died six months before you set your sights on being an actor you arrived in notting hill but how how are you surviving what are you living on i knew somebody that i'd been at university with who was living in notting hill and he had a neighbour who rented a bedsit, one room, that had a bed on a ladder above the little kitchenette bit.

16:58It was£30 a week and I got a job as a waiter at Tutton's Brasserie in Covent Garden, which is still there. Were you the person that was sleeping up the ladder on the mezzanine? Yeah, I was living alone. I'm having horrible flashbacks to going out with boys that were living on those mezzanines and having to crawl up the ladder. I'm just having... Did you crawl up some of those ladders? Oh, absolutely. I've been up some of those ladders. Yes. I had people come up the ladder too. You have to put the other person against the wall in case they fall off and wake up the neighbours upstairs or beneath you.

17:42you worked waitering in tutton's it's a brasserie in covent garden it's still there yeah it's still there if i had to i was a good waiter because i don't drink and i didn't steal and it was amazing how much stealing went on and how much people drank Like the booze that people rushing off to the theatre didn't finish in their glasses. The female waiters would be quite sloshed by the end of the night because they were necking other people's leftovers. When you say stealing, are we talking about like... Bottles of wine, wheels of cheese. How do you get a wheel of cheese out of a restaurant? Under a big winter coat, which in the winter of 1982, people did.

18:28I saw somebody leave with half a wheel of parmesan under a winter coat. I kid you not. No names, no patron. Well, people are stealing wheels of cheese. Are they taking them back and you're eating this delicious... I don't know. I don't eat cheese. To me, it's like congealed snot. I think I kind of understand the cheese thing, though, because I love cheese, but it is one of the weirdest things that you could possibly put into your mouth. I can't even, the smell of it is enough to make me leave the room. But you hang around posh people all of the time. They're just so big on cheese. They're obsessed with it.

19:05I have a variety of cheeses. When they say a variety of, I'm out the door. If you were invited to Balmoral for Christmas and Camilla said, now let's all go into the drawing room to behold the cheeses. Would you even then go, I'm sorry? I've stayed with them in Sandrium, not Balmoral. And they don't go to the drawing room for the cheeses. The cheeses come into the dining room. And I have left the dining room when the cheeses have arrived. It's very easy. You just excuse yourself and go to the loo for 20 minutes. That's one of the most radical things I think I've ever heard anyone. Into the tower with you.

19:46You led me there. You were in Notting Hill in the 80s before Notting Hill was Notting Hill as we know it. To be able to rent a bed sit for£30 a week meant that it wasn't la-di-da by any stretch. How old were you then? I was 25. You're 25? Yeah. You've got a bed sit in. Yeah. And you could get cheap vegetables at the end of the day from the vegetable market. Yeah. The electric cinema was a flea pit where they showed all sorts of different repertoire of movies and old movies. And you could go there for next to nothing. So it was a very easy place financially to live, whereas now you need to be a squillionaire or own a council flat.

20:29What did you look like then? What was your look? What was your uniform that you put? What did you wear? I got a 1940s floor-length raincoat from Oxfam, which I wore. And when I was auditioning for Withnail in Notting Hill in 1986, There was a monsoon deluge of rain when I came out of Notting Hill Tube Station and I was wearing that coat. So when I went into the audition, I looked exactly like a sort of drowned rat that is described in the screenplay. You break out part five years after you've arrived in London. Yeah. With now. It got written down cult classic, but I think cult classic kind of brews slowly.

21:16Yeah, it does. Was it even an underground hit? No. It was an underground. Played in about six cinemas for a couple of weeks, got mediocre reviews, and then it disappeared. Ten years later, because of video, and then subsequently DVD and students watching it, and then doing the drinking game associated with it, matching drink for drink, what the characters do, then it accumulated this following. You know, I don't think people realize you are completely T-Toll. You don't drink. You don't drink anything. Yeah, but I had a great role model because my father was a chronic alcoholic. So I saw firsthand on a nightly basis what drunk looked like and how drunk people try to cover up the fact that they're drunk.

22:04Also, can I ask, is it true that the director, Bruce Robinson, wanted you to try booze while preparing for the role of Withnell? Oh, he forced me to. He said that before the final day of rehearsals before we went up to Penrith to start filming. We were at Shepparton Studios and he said, you have to have a chemical memory of what it's like to be drunk. And so he gave me a bottle of champagne and sent me home. And then I drank, I managed to drink the whole bottle through the night in between throwing up and they picked me up and took me for the final day of rehearsals with Paul McGann. And I passed out halfway through the rehearsals, but vomiting first in the garden.

22:46And they were falling about laughing. I remember that because they thought it was so funny that I was so drunk. Can you imagine that happening in this day and age? No, he'd be in jail. Yeah, yeah. I can tell from talking to you that food and the senses are key to how you experience, you understand the world. Now, I heard you in an interview say that when you get into character, you imagine two things. Your character's sex life. First of all. And what they eat. And what they smell like. Those three things. Who, what and how do they shag? What do they smell like? And what do they like to eat? Can I ask Spice World the movie from 1997?

23:26Yes. What does Clifford have in his cupboards? Well, he didn't eat much because he lives on adrenaline and anger. So I think that he lived on rage and wine gums. And wore that Paco Rabanne. Million. Overpowering. An absolute repellent sidebound whippet. You worked with the Spice Girls at the absolute height of the madness. Yeah. What was that like? My daughter was eight. And she came home, listened on the answer machine while I was making her something to eat. Probably beans on toast. and opening a can. And she came through the kitchen apoplectic and she said, Dad, you've been offered the manager of the Spice Girls in Spice World, the movie.

24:19You have to do it. I don't care what you do. This is the only job I want you to do so I can meet the Spice Girls. My playground status for two terms was an all-time zenith because of that. All her friends came to meet them and they were incredibly kind. I'm not asking you to name your favourite Spice Girl from that experience, but who was the best one? Jerry was the most direct. Sporty was the most withdrawn, probably because I talk too much. And the person that engaged with my daughter the most was Baby Spice, Emma Bunton. And Victoria was very funny. It's hilarious to me that she has this public persona now of being that she doesn't smile a great deal.

25:00She's really funny. You haven't mentioned Scary. Oh, Scary. Scary did this great thing. I had very tight, shiny suits on. And Scary pinched my bum and she said, you're not bad for an old bloke. And I thought that was the best to be told by Scary that my bum wasn't too bad. It's a great compliment. I love that 20-somethings think that by the time you're 40, it's just really nice that you're out of the house and just well done.

25:43What did you imagine the diet and sexual proclivities were of your character Jack Hawk in Can You Ever Forgive Me? for which you were nominated for an Oscar in 2019? Cigarettes and booze and gets food out of a dumpster. Skip because he is destitute. He was my first alcoholic since Withnail. And he was a real person, as Withnail was based on a real person. And this man, Jack Hawk, did exist. So someone said to me that on the morning of the Oscars, you actually cooked. Is that right? I did, because the night before, I called Melissa McCarthy and I said, to try and normalize this completely surreal, abnormal situation that I'm in, if I buy all the ingredients because I was in a hotel next to Whole Foods um can I come around to your house with your kids and your husband and I will cook breakfast for us and then we'll go to the Oscars you have to leave at about one o 'clock so we did so we swam jumped on the trampoline and I cooked eggs and all that stuff is that not stressful in somebody else's kitchen no it must have been like when you go stress it goes to a holiday cottage and you can't find the tin opener and you can't find the toaster except with Melissa McCarthy.

27:06Grace Depp, believe me, multi-millionaire as multiple homeowner, Melissa McCarthy. You don't go searching around. You just say, where's the tin opener? Where's the oven? Where's the copper pan? How difficult is it to go and make scrambled eggs? She was surprised that I used olive oil instead of butter. You were in Dracula in 92. Yeah. I've heard that Francis Ford Coppola cooks. We all went to his Napa Valley estate, this big wine estate that he has outside San Francisco. And we rehearsed there for two weeks and all stayed in his house. And he cooked for all the cast, Winona, Ryder, and Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman and Keanu Reeves and Gary Elwes.

27:50He cooked dinner for us every night. Hang on. And he's a brilliant chef. Did he cook? Yeah, he did cook. Yeah. He loves cooking. How do you do a whole day on set and then run home at the speed of light and suddenly… Because we're rehearsing. So he'd stop rehearsals at five o 'clock. Yeah. And then we went trampolining and he put us in hot air balloons to have a bonding experience. Or we went walking through the Winelands or we went dancing in the local town. And then he would cook. And we all sit on the veranda of his amazing house. Do you know when people have affairs on set and they always say, well, how could that possibly happen?