ROB RINDER: What Happens When Your Dream Doesn’t Work Out | GREAT MOMENTS

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2:35Rob Rinder: Hello everyone, I'm Jamie Lang and this is Great Moments. Hey everyone, I hope you're well and welcome back to Great Moments. Now if you're new here, this is the place where I'm going to bring you a standout moment from one of my favorite great company conversations. These are the moments that have stayed with me long after the recording, and I hope you can take something away from them. Now, if today's conversation leaves you wanting more, you can find the link to the full episode in the show notes. So sit back, settle in, and here it is. I think you're going to struggle in this episode because you're a great interviewer.

3:13Rob Rinder: And whenever I interview people who are great interviewers and do it as their job, which you do because I was running this morning on my running machine and you were on my TV right there with Ranveer, who is lovely. And with interviewers, you find it hard to be interviewed because you're used to be interviewing. Well, I don't think it's that I'm an interviewer that's going to cause you a problem. It's that I spent years, you know, as a barrister. And most importantly, I'm not desperately interested in me. And so when people ask me about my world, I tend to, as you will have no doubt, notice and very thoughtfully and strategically throat cleared in that way, deflect so if i didn't want to answer the question i'll change the question and um then generally speaking we'll try and um get us to a place where in a cult we're actually talking about you instead yeah but that's just my general discomfort about talking about me but why why are you why do you not find it because you were so in you're so interesting you really are the things that you've done i know you but you are just lean into it for lean into it for a second here we go lean into it you are so interesting the life that you've led the people that you've met, the jobs that you've done, the things that you have learned and studied.

4:22Rob Rinder: I spoke to, I think it was Alan Carr. You're friendly with Alan Carr. You read a book a week, pretty much. I used to, yeah. So also your knowledge of everything from the arts to the history to the law to politics, whatever it is, is so vast. And I'm really buttering you up. But how do you feel when you sit across tables, usually at television meetings? Yeah. Where people give you compliments of that kind. Is there no part of your body? Yeah, I seize up. Right, exactly. It's like you're looking for protruding parts of your body left to cringe. You know, you're so clever. And immediately what springs to mind is the people that are cleverer than you.

5:03Rob Rinder: And there's just a sense of just that enduring spiritual cringe. Oh, aren't you marvelous? And frankly, anybody who doesn't have that intuitive impulse at that point of people listing how great they are is generally is likely to be a problematic and be certainly no friend of mine. Okay. You're a dick. Thank you. That's better. Don't we? Oh, that's so reliable. Do you like that? Oh, fantastic. You're a big dick. This could have stuck on dick. So much more comfortable. Does that make you feel better? Yeah. Well, I tell you what, your show with Ryland, we had Ryland on, and do you know what he said?

5:44Rob Rinder: He spoke about what a real friend is, and he was describing you as how you are just a true friend. It was really, you should listen to it. It was amazing what he said about you. He makes me smart. Well, because real friendship is, isn't it? It's not the people who be there in the middle of the night. I mean, the emergency services will do that for you. And it's usually someone, usually rather toxic, who'll crowbar themselves into your emotional drama. Be wary. It's a bit like the godfather, you know, the person who comes first to your tragedy is often problematic. It's when things go really well.

6:14Rob Rinder: Who can you telephone that's going to sit alongside you and celebrate with unfettered joy? That's who your mates are, right? And he's that. And what's the matter? You've got your amazing hotels, which is coming out, which we saw each other. Oh, my God. This is such a story. Can we tell the story? I can't say where it is, actually, because... Because the series has been... It's in a location somewhere in the world. I mean, yeah. It's where there's lots of parties and clubs and rhymes with eletha. I mean, for fuck's sake, I used to keep state secrets. It's so funny. Television gets so nervous around this sort of stuff.

6:48Rob Rinder: I know. Whereas they sort of sit in meetings with, you know, the clandestine service. And they'd be infinitely less worried. Anyway, so we... Beautiful hotel in something that sounds like... Yeah, and I hadn't... So I actually got married in Ibiza and had a wonderful wedding. And although the marriage didn't last, Ibiza was very much our special place. Anyway, through a variety of extraordinary reasons, which won't mean much perhaps to lots of listeners, but much like a Noel Coward play, Private Lives, I discovered that I was going to be filming there completely, genuinely coincidentally at the same time as my ex-husband was going to be holidaying there with his new partner.

7:27Rob Rinder: He's not that new. They've been together for about five years. But we don't socialize and hadn't really met each other. It just happens I was going to be there serving the cocktails on telly whilst Mike's husband was there. So inevitably, you're going to work out for that moment and practice your chat. I was with my best friend who, thank goodness, manages me. So we hadn't prepared what to say, but she could intervene and pull me away. I don't do very well with first encounter. I'm a lot. You've met me, right? We've just scratched the surface i know it's great so um there was um me finally bumping into my ex-husband it was like a moment and he was very nice and we were chatting but it's self-evidently the nuclear-powered orcs so what what do you talk about you know when you've sort of got married up the road and you know a history behind one another and then there's this partner there who i've only you know superficially met before who also i must emphasize was very lovely but you know you're Of course.

8:24Rob Rinder: You'd be lying if you weren't saying that. You were standing there trying not to breathe out. And there I was having a perfectly nice chat. And out of nowhere came this charming voice going, oh, hi. Gosh, my old friend. All the various ways that you introduce yourself in a way that immediately makes me sort of react in a way that, is he being just generous or does he actually like me? But I think you are. Yeah, I'm so generous. No, it takes a lot of time for me to be satisfied that you're real. Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, you are, it turns out. But, you know, lots of people with that. There's an air of that.

9:00Rob Rinder: There can be an air, especially in the industry, there can be an air of sort of fakeness to it in a way. Because it's like. To say the fucking least, I've seen way more sociopathy in, you know, the world that we, this inhabits. And I have, you know, sitting across tables from people in Belmarsh. I mean, you know, it's people sort of invent personas when it's bullshit. But I'm standing with my ex-husband and then you come along and I say, oh, this is my wife. and this is my ex-husband. And you thought that I was taking the piss. I thought you were joking. Yeah, it was my first encounter. And then, because obviously it looks cool because he's, I think, probably plugged into kind of cool culture.

9:33Rob Rinder: And I had, you know, Radio 1 DJ, who's like my bestie, hanging there with your really hot wife. She was looking very hot. She was decorating the whole thing. So it just is important, that encounter. It would be a lie if you didn't want to say you wanted to look slightly six-packy and also a little bit connected and quite rich. and you delivered that for me. So I'm grateful. Benedict Cumberbatch was your... He... Married us. Married you. That is a flex. Not really. That is a... It's a flex if you get like Benedict Cumberbatch, who's in the Marvel movies as Doctor Strange and you hire him and you've got fuck loads of money.

10:12Rob Rinder: Your dad happens to be an Uzbek oligarch, in which case it's a flex. If he's been your mate since the age of 17, it's a mate, isn't it? I mean, and you would have asked him regardless of the fact that he was famous. But it is true that I gave up acting after seeing him act. That's true. But give me the story. I want to hear this. So I'd given up acting because I'd, when I said I wasn't bright at school, I was very average until I got to Sixth One College. And there was a teacher there who totally changed my life. Simply by, she just said something like, you're clever, aren't you? And it never occurred to me.

10:49Rob Rinder: and it really was as banal as that and from there it was like a switch went on truly and i i became completely absorbed in everything and anything academic catching up for lost time in everything right so i was very much sort of thinking of perhaps a career in law but certainly was very interested in academic things and you know took university very seriously and got a first but i I thought, well, I'd go and actually I got a triple first, but I don't think you should hide any lights under any bushels about that sort of thing. But I thought first day I'd have a go at acting because I had an OK time at the National Youth Theatre.

11:31Rob Rinder: I'd done the summer course, which I have to do. The next year I did Julius Caesar. And it's a big deal getting that. Chiwetel Ejiofor was in it. I mean, you know. Wow. Yeah, he was Julius Caesar. He doesn't seem to remember me whenever I see him. it's like it's like a sort of a rather sort of embarrassing ex-lover sort of looks at me like my first driving examiner who stopped halfway around our course and asked whether um i was trying to kill us both that sort of parent said hi chiwetel do you mean nothing anyway i'm sure he remembers me fondly i was lucius in that but i sort of gave up after that i just didn't think you saw ben and you saw him i saw him at university he read well i read the part first and I thought well it went rather well and I could feel because you can tell the director oh that's quite good yeah yeah yeah all right hello Julia Martinez director and then I don't know who was um I heard Benedict read it and it was just like different and it's more than different it's the difference between you I wouldn't have been able to um articulate what it was then but but I know what it is now.

12:39Rob Rinder: It's that sense where you know that you'll never achieve that. It's the type of talent that is the difference between becoming an artist and being one. And what great actors can do, and he, I really believe, has, and so few do, is he has this gift, it's what it is, in the way that great musicians, Mozart and others, can play from when they're little to physically inhabit the body of a character from an energy point from a voice from the way that a chin might move in a scene and that's the stuff that is just different from the type of thing i could do which was mimicry which would have resulted given how good i am at networking and a fairly average part in the wall pack and from time to time you know having a speaking bit on casualty.

13:34Rob Rinder: Wow. But I never would have, as they say, with Nail and I, played the Dane. So you saw it and you were just like, that is... Yeah, fuck it. I mean, look at that. But with love. Yeah, of course. Because, I mean, really with love. But this is what's interesting about that. You went into acting, and from what I read and found out is that you went and did it, and you really loved it, but you realised you weren't as good as your peers. And so there you thought, well, they're better than me, so I'm not going to do it. Is that right? Sort of partially right. I got into National Youth Theatre quite young.

14:09Rob Rinder: I'm from the type of background where being an actor wasn't exactly an aspirational job. It wasn't the thing that your parents were delighted by. Explain that to me. What do you mean? Well, I come from a, despite the fact that, you know, I use this a lot, but I hope it means something to your listeners. Hello out there. Read the Mitfords. I sound like I've been mugged by one. You know, like the voice of the Queen. This is not real. I mean, my voice is an artifice. It's a complete fiction. I grew up, you know, around the corner from Amy Winehouse and in a blended, by blended I mean class and ethnically blended community, went to the same school.

14:47Rob Rinder: But my dad was a taxi driver and they all sound white winky. That's how they all sound. High winky, by the way. White foxy. See, that's how I grew up. And then at the age of three, and it's no offense to them, although it sounds like a deliberate one, I sort of rather felt that I'd spiritually, intellectually and culturally outgrown them and had enough. So I invented this. People, I think, feel slight discomfort when you talk about parents in any way that's not exactly unkind. Let me put it this way. You know, I think it's important to be honest. When I grew up, I wasn't surrounded by people who I had an intuitive sense at that time of respect for.

15:39Rob Rinder: it wasn't the sort of idea that you know you see your teachers at school and then you see them like in the supermarket and they're like that's from teacher land i mean these are people who you reach beyond your fingertips to sort of know they're special in some way i mean i think it's being authentic about my early very early childhood i was obviously i've re-remembered this and recurated my memory from being older but i still remember being surrounded by people who i I thought, I've clearly got nothing in common with any of you. I'm not even sure you're unrelated. I mean, yeah. That's early to realise that.

16:11Rob Rinder: I know. They didn't have Jeremy Carl then. It was such a pity. Because I could have been one of those DNAters looking really disappointed at four, going, you are related to your family. I go, fuck. You're like Stewie from Family Guy. That's what you're like. I can live with that. Let's get taken to all these posh houses. You're like Hatfield House, and then they take me home. This is fucking absurd. Clearly I live here. You're like this highly intelligent child that believes you've been born in the wrong world. You're like, what is going on here? It's totally genuine. It's not like... No, I love that it's genuine.

16:38Rob Rinder: I didn't aspire to... I didn't want to be there. And so I invented this voice. You know, then... I mean, I remember. Right, Winky. Right, Foxy. Here, well, go give your dad a pound. I'll give you a pound if you got your dad to say this. I remember that. And I go, must I? I go, and then... Must. Right, go fuck it. Right, got your dad. Got your dad to say... And usually it would be something disgusting. And I go, all right.

17:24Hi, it's Bloma Faith. My podcast, Mad Sad and Bad, is back for season four. I'm sitting down with some amazing people, including Letitia Wright. When I'm really fearful of something, I just run towards it. Judy Love. I'm celibate. Out of choice. Yeah, I could get it any day. Grace Campbell. Here we have Anita, who's a dog psychic. Tell Eddie, stop barking when I'm... She said you're too noisy. And plenty more. Mad, sad and bad with me, Paloma Faye. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone? Save the gas.

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18:45Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.