Withnail & I at 30: Richard E Grant on the classic

Richard E Grant is looking angelic. The 60-year-old Swazi-English actor is sitting framed inside a huge arched window of an empty dining room in Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel. Golden light is streaming across his face, the city's castle in the background. The scene could be a Renaissance painting, but there's nothing angel-like about the performance we’re here to discuss, however: that of Withnail, the foul-mouthed and perpetually drunk scoundrel at the heart of Withnail & I, a hilarious and grim snapshot of late 60s London originally released in 1987.

Withnail & I is screening in the city later today as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival’s retrospective of HandMade Films (the production company formed by former Beatle George Harrison), but it’s a fair bet that this rep screening won’t be a discovery to people in the audience, such is the film's ubiquity in British culture. Most will have watched it at least once; many will have seen it considerably more times.

Bruce Robinson's endlessly rewatchable comedy has been on rotation in alt-teens' bedrooms and student halls since its release on home video in the late 80s; certainly no movie's DVD or VHS cases have had more joints rolled on them than Withnail’s. Its deliciously quotable dialogue (“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake”, “We want the finest wines available to humanity!”) has long become fused with day-to-day parlance. It was Grant’s big screen debut, and he certainly had no inkling he was making a film that would become so adored.

“I didn’t even think it would be released,” he tells us. While making the film, its prospects seemed limited. “The money-men said the title had to be changed, there were no women in it to speak of, Crocodile Dundee was the big movie of 1986 when we were shooting it, and nobody in the movie was famous, so it seemed realistic that it would never come out – that was the feeling,” he recalls. “So the fact that it did come out – it was on for about four weeks in a few cinemas – and then subsequently had a life on video, then DVD and online, is beyond anything we could conceive of happening. So its success is bizarre to me.”

Surely Robinson’s acid wit script suggested the film had the potential for greatness, we suggest. “I did think the script was hilarious,” agrees Grant. “But I thought, ‘It’s about a male friendship that’s falling apart, and it’s about actors. Who the fuck is going to be interested in that outside of a bunch of actors?’ But it seems to have resonated with people and I can’t really explain why. You tell me?”

We put forward a few suggestions: its vivid view of late 60s London, its wonderful characters, its ludicrous scenes, its dazzling dialogue, Grant’s own towering performance as Withnail. But he’s not buying it. “The character I play is an incredibly self-important, entitled, deluded, drug-addled alcoholic, who is a complete coward and utterly selfish. So you think, why would anybody want to spend their time regularly revisiting that person’s company? But people seem to. You can’t argue with it.”

Withnail & I is a coming-of-age film of sorts. It follows two out of work actors living in unhealthy co-dependence in a cold, rat-infested flat in a grey and decrepit Camden where the 60s have long stopped swinging. Grant’s own life experience as an aspiring actor in 80s London had proved the perfect preparation for the role. “I’d been out of work for nine months before I had auditioned for that film,” he recalls.

“You think one month out of work may be feasible, [after] two months you’re like, ‘OK, I’m getting desperate,’ but nine months seems like an eternity. If anyone says to you, ‘What do you do?’ And you say, ‘Well I’m an actor.’ ‘Oh, what have you been in recently?’ And you end up saying, ‘Well, I haven’t worked for nine months,’ you can just see them thinking, ‘Oh, this poor fucker, he’s never going to make it.’ So inadvertently that experience was the best preparation I could have had for playing Withnail. I understood all his frustrations.”

So knockout was Grant’s performance as the unemployed thespian, he’s barely been out of work since. He’s gone on to appear in over 50 features, from leading roles in small-scale British indies like Jack and Sarah and How to Get Ahead in Advertising (also directed by Bruce Robinson) to supporting parts in US blockbusters like Logan and Hudson Hawk. Along the way Grant has work with great filmmakers like Robert Altman (The Player, Prêt-à-Porter, Gosford Park), Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker's Dracula), Tim Burton (Corpse Bride), Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence) and Pablo Larraín (Jackie). He even shared the screen with the Spice Girls (Spice World). “It was a sweet ending for me,” he admits.

Considering his career began with his most iconic character, Grant has managed to carve out a pleasingly eclectic CV. Did he ever worry about being stereotyped? “I did get offered a whole bunch of things that were pale imitations of [Withnail & I’s] script, playing either a drug addict or an alcoholic, so there’s a choice you make and it seems to work.” This makes it sound like he had a firm career plan.

“Oh, you can never have a plan,” he says. “It’s like John Lennon said just before he was murdered: life is what happens in between your plans. You can think, I can do this or I can do that, but you have no control other than to say yes or no to a job of what you can or can’t do, and half the time you’re picking up the scraps of what more famous people left on the table.”

Of course, the role of Withnail is famously one of those discarded morsels. The recently retired Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor not known for his sense of humour, was the original first choice, but turned it down to do The Incredible Lightness of Being. Kenneth Branagh was also in the picture, but after consideration Robinson decided Branagh didn’t possess Withnail’s Byronesque qualities. "There's something about Ken that is the antithesis of Byronesque,” Robinson told the Telegraph. “He looks like a partially cooked donut."

Grant, on the other hand, had the right stuff. “Richard looks like a fucking Byron,” said Robinson. “When I met him and asked him to read there’s a line in the film where they’re trying to do some washing-up and he says ‘Fork it!’ about a rotten boiled egg or something. And he did it perfectly and I thought, if he can do that for one line…”

When we bring up Robinson, Grant has some spiky recollections about his eccentric Withnail & I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising director. “He is the funniest person that I know, and the most infuriating,” says Grant with a laugh. How so? “Well, because he has such enormous talent and I’ve only worked with him twice. He’s been promising to write and direct me in something else, but now he thinks he’s only going to live to July. But he has been saying since I’ve known him, ‘I’ve only got two more Christmases left,’ and he’s now 71.”

Grant has accepted that they may never work together again, but he clearly feels there’s wasted potential there. “It’s an annoyance to me because he said right from the beginning when we first met that his dialogue, when I speak it, sounds like he imagines it in his head, so it’s unforgivable that all these years have gone by and he’s not employed me since. So he’s a right fucker.”

It’s heartbreaking for us too, we tell Grant. Not only did they together create two of the funniest British films of all time, Robinson’s 80s movies were also sharply political in their outlook – especially when compared to the cosy Richard Curtis comedies that would go on to define British comedy in the 90s. “That’s Bruce Robinson's innately anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian political stance, so inevitably that has to come through the films that he has made,” says Grant. “And it’s just ironic that 30 years ago he was ranting about Mrs Thatcher in How to Get Ahead in Advertising, and now we have Theresa May, probably less in control than what Thatcher appeared to be, but again we’ve got a demented nanny trying to tell us what to do.”

Bruce Robinson, if you’re reading this: we need you back. And we need Richard E Grant speaking your words. 

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Withnail & I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising screened at EIFF 2017 as part of its HandMade Films retrospective