Richard E Grant on hosting the BAFTAs: "It’s like a dream come true"

In the same year he was hugely excited when he stood outside the home of his childhood hero Barbra Streisand, with a letter he’d sent to her when he was 14 years old – and even more excited when Streisand replied to his Tweet about it. And he is – you guessed it – hugely excited about his new role hosting this year’s BAFTA Film Awards.

"It’s like a dream come true," he tells me when we meet at BAFTA’s offices in central London. "I was astonished to be asked because I always thought that the people who host awards are comedians. I was surprised that they chose an actor… who’s not Ricky Gervais."

Usually, when a comedian like Gervais or Chris Rock is given an awards hosting job, their role is to mock and tease the nominees – but Grant sees things differently. "I’ve always been a fanboy," he says, "so having the opportunity to host means [being able to] share my unabashed fandom and celebration of the movies."

I ask what he’s enjoyed the most among this year’s crop of film nominations. "Cate Blanchett in Tár," he says. "It’s the kind of movie that Meryl Streep would have been in in the '80s or '90s. With the vogue for Marvel and superhero stuff, to see a movie that is a real character study is something that I hadn’t expected would come around again so soon."

He also loved The Banshees of Inisherin. "I was astonished it had such awards traction," he says. "It is so local and specific to Ireland, and a chamber piece where not really a lot happens – but everything happens. I am so relieved that these movies are being made and celebrated and recognised."

Since his breakout role in Withnail & I in 1986, Grant has become one of the most established actors in Britain, appearing in such films and TV shows as LA Story, The Player, Gosford Park, Downton Abbey and the aforementioned Can You Ever Forgive Me?, for which he received his first Oscar and BAFTA nominations. His love affair with film started young. Born in Swaziland, he came to Britain every three years with his parents, and it was on one such visit to London when he was 12 years old that he saw Oliver! at a cinema in Leicester Square. It was 1969.

"It made an extraordinary impression on me, because it had child actors in it," he recalls. "As somebody who wanted to be an actor secretly, seeing Mark Lester and Jack Wild was a very concentrated moment of understanding that you could become an actor, and still be young."

Living in Swaziland – the smallest country in the southern hemisphere – the idea of pursuing acting as a career was "completely fantastical and ludicrous", and not exactly welcomed by his father, a heavy drinking government administrator. When Grant was 15, he managed to see A Clockwork Orange. "It had a triple-X rating, and you couldn’t see it until you were 18 years old," he says, "so I snuck in by telling the woman who was at the box office that she looked just like Elizabeth Taylor."

Grant saw the film – but when he returned home his drunken father was so angry at him, he put a gun to his son’s temple and took a shot. Fortunately, he missed. Still, Grant’s enthusiasm for acting remained undimmed and he enrolled at drama school. At the end of the course, his professor told him he didn’t think Grant was likely to succeed as an actor "because I was very odd-looking, with a very odd face". Undeterred, Grant left Swaziland and arrived in Britain in the spring of 1982, working in a brasserie in London’s Covent Garden while trying to secure acting work.

He recently met Paul Mescal – who is nominated for a BAFTA and an Oscar for the independent film Aftersun and is currently appearing on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire. "It’s an incredible thing for a young actor like that," he says. "He’s got his whole career ahead of him."

I wonder if Mescal’s current moment in the sun (he already has a TV BAFTA for Normal People) reminded Grant of the initial excitement around his own debut in the generation-defining Withnail & I. "No, because Withnail was seen – and is still only seen – by such a tiny percentage of people," he says. "But it got a long life as a result of video and DVD and a sort of student cult following. And it remains as such."

Withnail led to offers to work in the US with the likes of Steve Martin in LA Story – "I’ve been friends with Steve now for 33 years" – and some of Hollywood’s finest directors: Robert Altman in Gosford Park, Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence and Francis Ford Coppola in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

As someone who, in his own words, has been a movie buff his whole life, how did it feel to work with the men behind some of the greatest films ever made? "Genuine gratitude coupled with real disbelief," he says. "We rehearsed [Dracula] in a big warehouse at Francis’s Napa Valley estate where there was the boat from Apocalypse Now and the desk from The Godfather. You could actually go and sit at the desk, and sit in the boat. I defy anybody not to be thrilled and overwhelmed by that. That’s why I’ve kept a diary all my life – because it’s the one way of making what seems unreal and unbelievable somehow concrete, because once you’ve done it, you can say, 'This actually happened.'"

In fact, Grant started his diary at the age of 11 after waking up in the back seat of a car and seeing his mother having sex with his father’s best friend. The young Richard couldn’t tell anyone, so confided in his diary. That childhood trauma and his parents’ troubled marriage taught Grant lessons about love and secrets.

"I saw the cost of divorce, because my father suffered unrequited love for my mother and essentially drank himself to death," he says. "So I thought the best way to protect myself was to never get married, and to never fall in love. But of course, as you know, real life happens in between your plans."

In real life, Grant fell in love with and married dialect coach Joan Washington in the 1980s, and they were married for 35 years before her death in September 2021. Grant later wrote about his marriage and Washington’s life and death in a book based on his diaries called A Pocketful of Happiness. Speaking to Radio Times magazine last December, Grant said that writing the book helped him "navigate the abyss of grief" he found himself in.

Much of his life is an open book: his early years were also mined for his 2005 film Wah-Wah. "Having to keep a lid on my parents’ divorce and adultery and alcoholism was so toxic," he reveals. "I find that being open about everything seems the best form of protection." Though being that open does make Grant something of a pathological over-sharer, particularly on social media.

"That’s an English thing," he insists. "In America, Australia, Scotland and Ireland, over-sharing is not something that I’ve ever heard mentioned. But in England it is. There’s obviously something [I’m doing that runs] against the English sensibility to 'rein it in'. But you are who you are. I don’t have that amount of self-control where I can think, 'I’m going to rein this in.'"

His dislike of the English stiff upper lip reminds Grant that, while he may have made a career playing quintessentially British roles, that is not how he sees himself. "No matter how long you’ve been in a place," he says, "and I’ve been in England for 41 years – you’re still an outsider, looking in."

So do you feel like an immigrant, I ask. He pauses. "I do," he says. "People remind you that you’re not from here. Somebody will always say, 'Oh, you’re from there, aren’t you?' And every now and again, somebody will say, 'Oh, gosh, you’re not from here.' All the people that I grew up with have been in contact with me, and said, 'God, you’re hosting the BAFTAs?' Their disbelief exactly matches what I feel. That hasn’t changed even though I’ve been doing this for so long."

Following the BAFTA presenting gig, Grant will return to the day job – upcoming projects include a role in the new film from Emerald Fennell and a three-hander with Julie Delpy and Daryl McCormack (BAFTA-nominated twice for best actor and rising star this year for his role in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande with Emma Thompson).

I ask who else he would like to work with. "Do you know Quentin Tarantino?" he asks. "Can you please tell him that I want to play a washed-up, sleazy Las Vegas crooner. That’s what I want to do. There are so many directors I want to work with. And when I saw Paul Mescal the other day, I said, 'I hope that within my lifetime, I get to work with you.' There’s extraordinary talent emerging all the time."

The publicist indicates it’s time to wrap up, so I return to Grant’s trickiest role to date – BAFTA frontman. Is he at all intimidated about standing in front of his acting peers as their work is judged?

"I’m just nervous about BAFTA putting a clause in my contract that I can’t walk around the Royal Festival Hall with my camera, taking selfies with people who I’ve long admired," he says. It’s an answer that in its combination of starriness and humility feels quintessentially Richard E Grant – simultaneously playing the insider and outsider, the film star and the fan.

The EE BAFTA Film Awards 2023 will air on BBC One from 7pm on Sunday 19th February 2023. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on.

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