Vanity Fair: The Cult of Richard E. Grant’s Withnail and I
Bruce Robinson’s script for his 1987 cult classic, Withnail and I, wanders effortlessly between the high (a Hamlet soliloquy) and the low (“You can stuff it up your arse for nothing and fuck off while you’re doing it!”). But it’s the incandescent performance of Richard E. Grant that sends the dark British comedy—about a couple of out-of-work actors—into the stratosphere of greatness.
So it’s less weird than it might at first seem that the movie which screened at New York’s Film Forum on Thursday night wasn’t the one that has earned Grant a best-supporting-actor Oscar nomination—Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy—but the one that forged his legend more than three decades ago.
Over coffee in Brooklyn, I asked Grant if he could tell when he read the script for Withnail and I that it was a role for the ages? “I knew it bone-deep,” he said. “It made me laugh out loud, it was so brilliantly written. Even the stage directions were hilarious. I had also been unemployed for nine months, too, so it was the best preparation I could have had for playing an embittered unemployed actor.”
Here’s the best part: Grant was only offered the role after Daniel Day-Lewis passed. “Thank God Daniel Day-Lewis turned it down,” Grant said. “That’s all that I can say. When I worked with him on Age of Innocence, I prostrated myself in his Winnebago and said, ‘Oh, Daniel, I owe you everything that’s happened to me!’ And it’s true.”
In 2017, Grant told the U.K.’s Country Life: “Not a day goes by without someone quoting Withnail and I at me.” He said there isn’t a film he quotes all day long, but he has his obsessions. Barbra Streisand is one. Perfume is another. (He has his own brand, Jack.) And he’s re-read Alice in Wonderland every year for the past 40 years. So he gets it.
For those unfamiliar with Withnail, which has always been more popular in Great Britain than in the United States, here’s a quick cheat sheet:
It’s a movie about the air of disenchantment that hovered in the winds of the late 1960s.
It’s about youth and ambition and recklessness and disappointment and the dissolution of relationships.
It was Richard E. Grant’s first film role.
Given that Grant served up one of the great comedic performances of all time, it is arguably the greatest performance of his career.
For the super-fan, a missed opportunity to reference Withnail and I is nothing short of personal failure.
For example, the only sensible way to respond to Grant’s Oscar nomination was to quote his own words from 1987: “Let’s celebrate. We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!”