Richard E Grant: ‘I still feel like Withnail every day – acting is a challenge’

Richard E Grant has enjoyed a huge variety of parts in his over four-decade-long career, appearing in everything from Shakespeare to Spice World to Star Wars and working with Martin Scosese, Francis Ford Coppola and Emerald Fennell.

The 68-year-old Oscar nominee has also played a drag queen (Everybody’s Talking About Jamie), a superhero villain (Loki) and was Bob Cratchit to Sir Patrick Stewart’s Scrooge in a 1999 TV adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

In his newest film, Nuremberg, he co-stars with Russell Crowe, Rami Malek and Leo Woodall, telling the story behind some of the most famous trials in history – those held by the Allies against the surviving high-ranking Nazi officials of World War Two, including Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring (played by Crowe).

He appears as Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the British prosecutor ‘who comes in like the cavalry at the eleventh hour and finally nails Göring’, as Grant puts it.

Having been filmed in full, he was able to watch the trials on YouTube.

‘Seeing the real man, how he spoke, how he walked, talked, everything about him, is a real gift as an actor. Then you have the responsibility of hopefully trying to play that as accurately to him as possible, because he has living relatives,’ Grant shares with Metro.

The ‘unprecedented’ challenge of Nuremberg for Richard E Grant

But despite everything he’s done so far, Nuremberg still provided him with an ‘unprecedented’ challenge, when Crowe and Michael Shannon, who acts asUS prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson, petitioned writer-director James Vanderbilt to film their courtroom scenes in one interrupted 22-minute take, an experience Grant remembers as ‘electric’ – if also terrifying.

‘I was only scheduled to do my five pages’ worth a day later. I thought I had time to sit back and listen to these guys go at it – so when they sprung it on me and said we’re going to do it all in one go today without any rehearsal at all, you feel… a slight tightening of muscles in various parts of your body that you hadn’t experienced quite that way before!’ he laughs.

Another striking part of the film is its use of the real-life footage from concentration camps shown to the courtroom at Nuremberg, at a time when the world was only just beginning to uncover the full extent of the Nazis’ atrocities.

Vanderbilt requested that none of the cast watch that portion of the trials ahead of the shoot, Grant reveals, so he could capture everyone’s genuine first reactions.

‘And all the extras were mostly elderly Hungarians whose parents lived through the Nazi occupation and then they had lived through the subsequent communist occupation, so they had first-hand, visceral experience of what it was like to live under a repressive regime. When all of us watched that footage for the first time in the courtroom, it was pin-drop silence,’ the actor shares.

‘It’s hard to describe how shocking that really is – and was and continues to be – seeing bulldozers pushing piles of emaciated bodies into a pit. It’s awful to watch, but you can’t look away at the same time, and you hope that it’s never going to happen again.’

How Richard E Grant became an Instagram icon

Alongside his acting career – which has also included Death of a Unicorn, The Thursday Murder Club, 100 Nights of Hero and Lena Dunham Netflix TV show Too Much just this year – Grant has become a hugely popular figure online, sharing snippets of his daily life from the mundane to the whimsical and starry with his 860,000 Instagram followers.

His arrival on social media developed organically from his turn as a drink-sodden thief in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which received Academy recognition in 2019.

‘I shamelessly took selfies with every single famous person that I came across in those four or five months that the award season lasted. I knew that I would never, before or since, have a moment in my career like that – it was like being at Madame Tussauds for real,’ he says.

He became close with Lady Gaga during that awards season campaign (she was nominated for A Star is Born), telling her how miffed he was when she didn’t play his favourite song at her recent London stop on the Mayhem Ball tour (Show Me Your Teeth, FYI).

I’ve been star-struck my whole life

Grant blames his glee for photo trophies on having been ‘star-struck my whole life’ thanks to being born in the tiny country of Swaziland [now Eswatini].

‘The idea that you could succeed as an actor or meet the people that you’ve idolised, seemed so impossible and remote. So even though I was 62 when that happened, I was as wired up as I might have been when I was 10 years old. And I posted that, and it had an amazing response,’ he adds.

He also knows he’s cultivated an even more meaningful group of followers since the death of his wife, dialect coach Joan Washington, in 2021.

‘I posted very honestly about what it is like to lose somebody that you’ve been with for 38 years – and that has resonated with people who are going through or will go through grief.’

This also came through in his 2023 memoir A Pocketful of Happiness, which drew from his diaries in recounting their relationship.

‘It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who’ve seen Withnail and I’

It seems impossible to talk to Grant without referring to his debut film, 1987’s Withnail and I, as it’s such a cult classic among fans and actors alike (Paul Rudd, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp have all gone on record declaring their love for it). I apologise, but he’s more than happy to indulge me as he likely must every journalist in every interview.

But he knows exactly why it resonates so much with actors, given the common denominator of them all having – as he puts it – ‘a large ego and also chronically low self-esteem and imposter syndrome’.

‘There’s no actor that I’ve ever worked with that doesn’t have that formula or combination,’ he maintains. Although Withnail himself has, outwardly at least, far more of the former than the latter.

The other resonant link for actors is, of course, unemployment, Grant’s longest stretch being nine months in 1985 before he then landed the role of Withnail.

I’m sure that many actors must have come up to Grant to relay their fondness of the film to him, including ones he would never have predicted – and he doesn’t disappoint.

‘The first time I went to LA, I met Robin Williams at a party, and Sean Penn was there, and they both came up and said, “You’re that guy from that film with the unemployed actor” – I was absolutely gobsmacked. And subsequently, Bette Midler! Who knew that Bette Midler would be a fan of that movie?

‘Right across the board, it never ceases to amaze me the number of people that have seen it because it was such a minor cult film.’

I ask him when the last time was that he felt most like Withnail, expecting an anecdote from years ago – ‘Oh, every day!’ he insists, immediately.

‘There’s always somebody who’s got the part that you wanted or that you feel that you should have got, or is doing better than you,’ Grant adds, admitting that ‘trying to avoid ending up bitter and twisted is a challenge’.

‘After the age of 40 or 50 your parts and your recognition reduce, so you’ve got to somehow reconcile yourself to that otherwise you would be driven crazy. I won’t say the name of this person, but there’s a British actor who is absolutely convinced that another much more famous British actor has stolen his career.’

There’s an actor who’s convinced another much more famous British actor has stolen his career

While he may be suggesting the usual assumption that Hollywood cares less for actors the older they get, he still saw his Academy Award nomination in his 60s, change things for him, savouring the recognition it brought him from his peers.

People such as Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin already knowing who he was ‘really takes you aback’, he says.

‘You feel like you’ve kind of arrived, albeit briefly. But for that moment, you think, right, okay, I’ve done something.’

How an Oscar nomination at 62 changed Richard E Grant’s career

Grant also agrees that he’s been having more offers through since he joined the hallowed circle of Oscar nominees, leading to the likes of his scene-stealing turn as Sir James Catton in Saltburn and starring opposite Rudd and Jenna Ortega in dark comedy – and another eat-the-rich satire – Death of a Unicorn earlier this year.

But he’s also under ‘no delusion’.

‘I knew that the heat that you get when you’re nominated up until you don’t win is a kind of honeymoon moment that you have – and I squeezed every pip that I could out of that experience – and then it resettles.’

However, he still appears giddy over earning the label for life, post-nomination – ‘even on the posters for Nuremberg, I’m playing a supporting part and it’s ‘Academy Award nominee’,’ he observes.

He has the starriest name to drop in relation to that too.

‘Tom Hanks said to me, “You know, that never goes away.” And I said, “Well that’s easy for you Tom, because you’ve got two of the golden boys.” And he said, “Yeah, but haven’t you had it where people assume that you have won the Oscar because they don’t remember who actually won the thing?”’

And yes, it turns out that Hanks was correct about this phenomenon.

‘When I came back to London in 2019 after this awards thing had ended, I had people come up to me in the street and say, “Oh, great that you won!”’ Grant recalls. ‘Initially I would say, “No, I didn’t win, Mahershala Ali won” – but it’s like they don’t want to hear that. They want to believe – or they believe – that you did win. So I said, “Yes, thank you very much.”

‘It’s a sweet moment.’

Nuremberg is in cinemas now.

Got a story?

If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.