Why ‘Looking Too Weird’ Shouldn’t Stop You From Acting | Richard E. Grant on Acting

when I look back at my childhood from the vast age of 61 I see that the the line from what my first impulse to the career that I've ended up has has been very very clear in that when I was seven I've got photographs of making theaters out of shoe boxes with cutouts and made the scenery and then put cutouts from magazines on lollipop sticks and use those as like very crude puppets then I made hand puppets then I got Pelham string puppets every year for Christmas and birthday and I had a full-sized marionette theater my parents garage and was in every school play that I could possibly in and involved in this was now a theatre theatre club that was where I grew up so there was there's no where that impulse came from the first place I have no idea because I have no theatrical roots in my family whatsoever so when I look back on that it's you know it's absolutely clear that's that's what I wanted to do but because of where I grew up it seemed as ludicrous as saying that you wanted to be an astronaut would you know in the land on the moon in 1969 when I was 12 and I said I wanted to be an actor people go yeah you know so the fact that I then went to drama school in University and then became a professional actor is the fulfillment of what I had always wanted to do but when you're a kid I don't know that you have such a clear idea but you know looking back as I just said the line is very clear I think almost every actor I know has this experience where it's like no is invisibly tattooed on people's heads they go we don't want you we're not going to give you the job we're not gonna give you the break or the chance and once you accept that no is the default mode that people go into and you get used to that you go I'm gonna keep trying until you break through until somebody says yes I also had the great good fortune of having a music English teacher called bunny Barnes who died 10 years ago at the age of 89 who throughout my childhood when my parents were I think pretty taken aback that I wanted to become an actor she gave me moral support and encouragement and having one person that believes in you is invaluable and the letters that we exchanged when I once I was an adult I go back to you know fairly frequently because her advice and and just somebody that goes yes you can do it is incredibly powerful when I had completed drama school training in University his professor gave the end-of-year assessment of what he thought your career prospects were as professionally as possible and he said you look too weird to really make it as an actor in my opinion he said you've shown real talent as a director and a writer I think that is that going to be the path of your career so because I respected him and admired him I thought well that is maybe what is going to happen so when I finally got you know the first movie role that I ever got in 1986 playing with nail in with no and I all of his advice came to hold me in that every single review that I remember reading talked about the fact that I had lantern-jawed tombstone featured cEPAL coral bucket face you know it was concentrating on what I looked like and I thought oh that's exactly what the professor told me what he got wrong mercifully for me is that I have had and continue to have a career as a paid actor rather than being a director although I have done that as well when I got with Nolan in 1986 I'd been unemployed for nine months so your self-esteem is absolutely annihilated as an actor because if you're not working then you feel like you have no idea so being cast to play a bitter out-of-work actor having been embittered and out of work for nine months was a sort of synchronicity of life experience and then playing this character [Music] certainly his this characters self-destruct button and sense of entitlement it's not what I feel that I have but it's the irony of having played an unemployed actor which has led to almost every single job I've had since including this Melissa McCarthy film that's you know I mean at the moment can you ever forgive me as a result of being in that film 32 years ago is something that still amuses me that's that's that it's had that fallout effect really when we made the film nobody had any idea that it might be success because it had a title that people said was unpronounceable it had no women no car chases Crocodile Dundee was the big hit of 1986 while we were shooting his film up in Cumbria and there was nobody famous in it and they said well and there was no plot to speak of so on paper that the wisdom was that it would never get released so you know I thought what just if maybe just one or two people see it then maybe I'll get further employment and the other thing that I'm very often asked is how much of it was improvised and there was not a single word or comma or apostrophe that wasn't scripted by Bruce Robinson who wrote and directed it and he was and remains a complete stickler for that because he said if I spent years you know working my guts out to get the dialogue exactly as I want them I will not have some actor coming along and going oh I'm just gonna make up what I'm going to improvise so he was very very script specific about that I think first and foremost what draws you to any project is the quality of the script even though I have been hand on heart been in spice well the movie because my eight-year-old daughter was absolutely obsessed that I work with them because she could then meet them and they were absolutely amazing and we had a great time on it because a lot of it was improvised so that was hugely enjoyable for you know to do as a job but being asked to do something different to the thing that you've just done is always what you hope is going to happen so that you don't get locked into only playing one kind of part and essentially you know I've had a I suppose what do you call a journeyman actors career in that I've had some fame and recognition but I've not had the kind of career where some people only get to play one kind of part and that's what they're forced to do a night I worked on a disastrous movie called Hudson Hawk 30 years ago with Bruce Willis and he said to me why are you prepared to play people who are sexually deviant or morally this or whatever he said because I play heroes and I said do you not find that limiting or dull in any way he looked at me as the host mentally and said no that's that's what I like to play but he said you English guys are prepared to play people who are unsympathetic or weird or oddball or whatever and I said but that's what makes it interesting otherwise you're just doing the same thing aren't you and he said well I earn a lot of money doing that and I couldn't argue with that the real person that I play called Jack Hawking can you ever forgive me obviously Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel nobody I never met anybody that knew him all of his friends had died of AIDS in the mid 90s and he died of AIDS in 1994 very little was known about Lee Israel herself which she was very reclusive and private writer I did have I do have an biography that she'd written of this American actress for 1940s core Tallulah head and so I have on my shelf as you know Tallulah Bankhead by Lee Israel but because she was a biographer who's used her talent to subsume herself so that she wasn't at the forefront of trying to be famous in her own right I didn't know anything about her life and had no idea as most people didn't seem to did the fact that she became a literary forger of famous dead writers work out of economic necessity and she falls in collusion with Jack Hawke who is an alcoholic petty thief drug dealer who'd been in jail for a couple of years that I didn't know this about him because he held up a taxi driver at knifepoint and and he was basically he was hiv-positive by the time they met and they fall into this love-hate platonic relationship because he's a gay man and she's a lesbian writer a lesbian woman and it goes through all the vicissitudes of friendship in that the initial sort of honeymoon followed by loyalty phase of friendship is then followed by the inevitable betrayal and then the reconciliation just before he dies because Leah's royal asks jack for permission to write the story which becomes can you ever forgive me [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: BAFTA Guru

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Keywords: BAFTA, BAFTA Guru, British Academy Of Film And Television Arts (Award Presenting Organization), creative, career, film making, TV, gaming, actor, advice, movie, movies, movie making, acting, richard e grant, bram stoker's dracula, game of thrones, got, downtown abbey, izembaro, can you ever forgive me?, melissa mccarthy, supporting actor, best supporting actor, BAFTA Film, BAFTA Film awards 2019, BAFTA nominee, doctor who, spice world, spice girls, the little vampire, about time, jackie

Id: ngt8o2WCuts

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019