“I was absolutely devastated”: the betrayal Richard E Grant will never forgive
Technology has given us plenty of fun developments, the ability to wirelessly stream high definition films, for example, although annoyingly not pizzas you can cook in ten seconds flat like in Back to the Future 2. But it has also given us constant communication, through messaging and email, and as Richard E Grant knows, that has the ability to backfire very badly indeed.
Anyway, the ‘E’ in the 69-year-old’s name certainly doesn’t stand for e-mail (it actually comes from his original name of Esterhuysen), for reasons we’ll come to later, but the upper-class actor is someone who has very much embraced tech in his later years, or at least social media via his mobile phone.
He’s amassed almost a million followers on his Instagram account, where he posts all kinds of updates on a regular basis, something he began as a way to process and try to deal with the grief of losing his wife of 35 years, Joan Washington, back in 2021. Not long after that, he began filming one of the movies that has contributed most to his late-stage career renaissance, Emerald Fennell’s bathtub-licking farce Saltburn, for which he was highly acclaimed.
That came five years after he made what has probably, along with his brilliant 1987 debut performance in Withnail & I, gone down as his most critically successful movie, 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a biographical drama about a female author called Lee Israel who tried to spark her career by forging work by dead writers. Grant plays her gay friend in the film, and for his performance, he earned a raft of award nominations, including the Academy Awards, Baftas, Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes.
The motif of forgiveness in that movie, or rather a lack of it, is fitting for Grant, and here is where the email comes in. Back in 2004, as Grant worked hard on writing and directing Wah Wah, a comedy drama starring Nicholas Hoult based on his own early life in Swaziland, he was caught up in a crossing of correspondence about him that he was never meant to read.
He told the Mad, Sad, & Bad podcast: “What I thought was one of the five best friends in my life, she sent an email from Africa to a mutual friend in Australia who’d asked for my email address, and, because my name was in the body of the email, I got inadvertently sent this email.”
Grant explained that the email contained “a paragraph of such toxicity” that he decided never to speak to the woman involved again, coming as it did amidst other pieces of bad news.
He added, “I thought, ‘That’s not a real friend anymore’. And I was absolutely devastated. So I copied and pasted that and then sent it back. And I said, ’29 years of friendship?'”
The actor said that he felt the whole experience was so brutal that there was no going back, and has stuck to that ever since. On top of that, Wah Wah lost millions at the box office, with a niche subject matter and mixed reviews leading to the film disappearing without a trace.
Nevertheless, Grant rebounded to have two decades of success in film and TV, and he has several more projects on the way in different stages of readiness, including an upcoming Sacha Baron Cohen comedy for Netflix called Ladies First, about a male chauvinist boss who hits his head only to wake up in a world where women run the world.
