Richard E Grant: ​‘Act­ing is like jug­gling with jel­ly and water’

Jack Hock is the one friend of acid-tongued, lit­er­ary let­ter forg­er Lee Israel in direc­tor Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever For­give Me? His bul­let­proof charm is matched by his thirst for intox­i­ca­tion. Richard E Grant, for­ev­er embla­zoned in the cul­tur­al imag­i­na­tion as anoth­er drunk­en chancer thanks to his icon­ic role in With­nail & I, took a break from shoot­ing the new Star Wars to talk about get­ting into the skin of a real per­son, the truth-o-meter effect of act­ing oppo­site Melis­sa McCarthy, and why per­fume-mak­ing is more lucra­tive than movie-making.

LWLies: When you’re play­ing some­one this over-the-top, is it like play­ing a char­ac­ter on top of a char­ac­ter, or did you have an idea of who Jack was under­neath all his flamboyance?

Grant: Once I knew that Jack Hock was HIV pos­i­tive, liv­ing under the Damacles of, ​‘Is today my last day?’ then his hedo­nism is all in rela­tion to that. The moment he got any mon­ey it burnt a hole in his pock­et. He had to go and have a good time because, as he says to Lee in a din­er, ​‘Life is grim. Make the best of it while you can.’ Know­ing that you’re on a short fuse of what’s left I absolute­ly under­stood why he did what he did and was out to grab as much as he could of life before he was ren­dered inca­pable, so I sup­pose that under­pinned it.

How did know­ing that he had a death sen­tence inform the way you approached char­ac­ter­is­ing him?

Once Lee had been rum­bled by the FBI, he was the per­son who went out and had to sell the let­ters con­vinc­ing­ly. In the mem­oir, Lee Israel notes that where she might have expect­ed between $400 and $600 dol­lars for a let­ter, he’d come back with two grand, so he was obvi­ous­ly real­ly good at fleec­ing peo­ple and putting on the charm. That was a great clue to what lev­el of con­fi­dence he could put out. What­ev­er his scam he obvi­ous­ly had the imag­i­na­tion to pull that off, so you think, ​‘What kind of per­son does that and does it successfully?’

Is act­ing a sim­i­lar kind of a scam?

Yeah, I think it is. You do some­thing that you don’t feel con­fi­dent about doing, but you have to feign that you are. I can remem­ber read­ing Dawn French, the come­di­an, talk­ing about how when she was as an ado­les­cent she used to pre­tend to be some­body else in order to be able to han­dle a social sit­u­a­tion with many peo­ple. She’d think, ​‘I’ll pre­tend to be some­body who is confident.’

How do you know if you’re pulling off the performance?

If peo­ple around you believe what you’re doing. Melis­sa McCarthy’s truth-o-meter is so accu­rate. She doesn’t allow for any fak­ery. She’s so true to what she is doing that you react to that. I don’t know – it’s so hard to ratio­nalise things that you do instinc­tive­ly and are also informed by the script and the part that you’re play­ing. As soon as you try to explain how you do some­thing, or how you act a part, it’s like jug­gling with jel­ly and water. The moment you try to hold onto it, it slips through your fingers.

It sounds like you’re sen­si­tive to the peo­ple around you.

I think that every­body is, aren’t they? If I sat here, Robert De Niro-like, and gave you mono­syl­lab­ic answers it would change the atmos­phere of our room. If I was here doing a Simon Cal­low and talk­ing very gar­ru­lous­ly or very loud­ly then it would be a whole dif­fer­ent way. You react off the per­son that you’re meet­ing for the first time, don’t you think?

How did they make you look so unwell in the end scene?

I had a great friend, Ian Charleson, who was in Char­i­ots of Fire, who died of AIDS in 1990. When he lost all his hair he wore that ban­dana-scarf around his head and was very, very pale and drawn. I lit­er­al­ly took some baby pow­der the night before, put it on my face, pen­cil marked in my cheeks, tied a scarf around my head and sent this to the make-up depart­ment and to Marielle. I said, ​‘This is what a friend of mine looked like before he died. Is this too extreme to do?’ They googled pic­tures of what peo­ple were look­ing like at that time who’d had AIDS and agreed.

Is that one appeal of act­ing: that you get to chan­nel things you’ve seen or learnt else­where in life?

Every expe­ri­ence that you have whether you take it on board con­scious­ly or not influ­ences and ref­er­ences what you do and what choic­es you make. The old­er you are – and I’m near­ly 62 – the more you have to draw on in what you’ve lived through that that inevitably informs how you play a part. Yep. Unques­tion­ably. That’s absolute­ly dead accurate.

You made a film about your child­hood in Swazi­land. Have you any more films in you?

Hope so. Writ­ing and direct­ing an indie film, it took five years from script to screen for me to get that made. I’ve adapt­ed or worked on two oth­er projects, indie films, that both col­lapsed four weeks before we began shoot­ing for the last 10 per cent of finance. I got so frus­trat­ed with that, that I then start­ed mak­ing per­fume and that busi­ness has been very finan­cial­ly reward­ing. Also, you have a result and some­thing tan­gi­ble. You don’t have to wait 10 years for the thing to get made and to dis­ap­pear, so I’ve got way­laid into perfumerie.

You can fun­nel your per­fume bil­lions into your next film.

Exact­ly, I’ll do that.

Can You Ever For­give Me? is released 1 Feb­ru­ary. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.