Richard E. Grant tells Chris Evans about the ‘sliding doors moment’ of being cast in Withnail and I

Virgin Radio

1 Feb 2023, 12:05

The legendary Richard E. Grant has narrated the audiobook for With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant, which details his life and career after getting his big break in the classic film, Withnail and I.

The actor joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch to talk about some of the amazing stories within the audiobook of his bestseller, which originally came out in 1996. 

Talking about being cast in the seminal movie Withnail and I, he told Chris: “I found out that Daniel Day-Lewis had turned the part down, and that they'd spent two months trying to find an actor that could make the director laugh, or hear the words as he heard them in his head. 

“So I'm on my first meeting with him. I said two words, ‘fork it’, and made him laugh, and I semi-attacked him. And that made him laugh. And I didn't know that he hadn't laughed at anybody else before. So he thought, ‘Well, if this little oik can do these two words correctly, then I get him back in to see if I can train him up to play this part’. 

Richard later added: “It's a sliding doors moment that, if Daniel Day-Lewis hadn't turned down that part… I would not be sitting here 40 years later.”

The film was such a hit that the actor started to get recognised by A-listers in Hollywood. “I met Robin Williams, and he just wanted to talk about that,” he said. “A 19-year-old, tiny actress called Winona Ryder came up to me and she said, my boyfriend Johnny Depp and I know every single line of Withnail and I,” he added.

Richard also spoke to Chris about receiving a call from superstar comedian Steve Martin one Saturday morning. Hear him talk about it below: 

Still friends all these years later, Richard said that he called Steve Martin the other day for advice about hosting the 2023 BAFTAs, as he has previously hosted the Oscars. “He said, ‘Oh, you'll be fine. You’ll be fine’,” he revealed. 

Telling Chris that he finds the prospect of hosting the BATFA’s “terrifying," he explained: “If you're a comedian, you have licence to go in and roast everybody, because you're not relying on them for future work. You know, all the writers, directors and actors in that room of people that, either I know them or want to work with them in the future. So you can't go that route.”

The star actor has worked with some of the world’s best directors, including Robert Altman. “I was at the ill-fated premiere of Hudson Hawk,” he said. “This guy tapped me on the shoulder, and it was Robert Altman sitting right behind me with Tim Robbins. And he said, ‘What are you doing next month?’ I said, ‘I will be unemployable, because what you're about to see will end my career unequivocally’.

Despite Hudson Hawk, in which Richard starred alongside Bruce Willis, not going down too well with critics, Altman chose to cast the actor in The Player, which “essentially saved me from the ignominy of being such an absolute turkey.”

On working with Francis Ford Coppola in Dracula, the Swaziland-born actor said: “He had this big warehouse where we did the rehearsals. It's like a big barn, and the boat from Apocalypse Now was in there. The desk from Godfather was in there. As a movie buff… to actually go and sit at the desk that Marlon Brando sat at, you know, giving an offer he couldn't refuse, was an extraordinary thing."

Richard told Chris about working with Martin Scorsese on The Age of Innocence. “It was monastically quiet, and very, very controlled. And he speaks at bullet speed," he said. "So it was very, very sort of reverential, and I couldn't connect this guy who directed all these incredibly violent movies, Mean Streets and Casino and everything else in between, with this very, very cultured man who wore suit and tie to work every day and was very obsessed with the place settings and the ballroom gowns of the turn-of-the-century upper class New York milieu that we were all in. 

“And then one day, somebody was speaking too loud, and he just absolutely lost it. Every expletive came out of him like Rumpelstiltskin. I thought, 'whoa, okay, I understand he is a human machine gun verbally'.”

On being introduced to Steven Spielberg by Julia Roberts on the set of Hook, Richard said: “Spielberg looked at me and, and he took one beat and he said, ‘Withnail, right?’ And I said, ‘That's right’. So he said, ‘Right, your job is to make Julia Roberts laugh in this scene, because we don't have any way to make her laugh’. So I started telling her stories about the insanity of making Hudson Hawk, which made him laugh. He's never given me a job since.”

The audiobook of With Nails follows last year’s A Pocketful of Happiness, a memoir devoted to his late wife, Joan Washington. “My wife died 15 months ago, and she said to me, four days before she died, ‘Try and find a pocket full of happiness in each day’. And it's been a great mantra to navigate the abyss of grief that my daughter and I have gone through. And I suppose that's what keeps me going, trying to find something as positive as possible. 

“I've had a huge amount of work since then, which which keeps me buoyed up and busy, but it's like having a parallel life, that my one life ended on the 2nd September 2021, when she died, and so everything that I'm living now feels almost like borrowed time after that. But you just have to get on with it.”

During his 30-minute conversation with Chris, Richard also spoke about hanging out with Sandra Bernhard and Madonna, Matthew Modine’s philosophy on how to win an Oscar, arguments on the set of Prêt-à-Porter and lots, lots more. Listen to the entire interview here.

With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant is available from wherever you get your podcasts.

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or  catch up on-demand here.