‘Withnail and I’: The “comedy masterpiece” Damian Lewis needed to watch twice to understand
There has long, long been a common understanding among people when growing up that the best way to find ‘your people’ or even who might turn out to be your very closest friend, is to bond over simply quoting your favourite comedy show or movie over and over again.
My mates and I did it with Bottom, Alan Partridge and The Office. Even The Beatles did it with The Goon Show, and Billions star Damian Lewis did it with a 1980s classic that has become a roadmap to hedonism.
But it didn’t happen immediately. The joys of Richard E Grant’s booze-soaked 1987 black comedy Withnail and I completely escaped Lewis when he first saw it, but that wouldn’t remain the case for too long. He had decided to become an actor in his teens and eventually graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It was there that he discovered the majesty of Bruce Robinson’s tale of two unemployed actors living in Camden Town squalor, but it took some time to fully land with him.
Asked by The Guardian to name a film he always returns to and why, Lewis admitted, “Withnail and I. I first watched it when I was a drama student, training to be an actor, and I didn’t get any of the jokes. It just seemed horribly real, and I had to watch it again to realise that it was a comedy masterpiece.”
Of the initial experience, he elaborated, “But when I first watched it, I sat there sort of glum and increasingly depressed at these two out-of-work actors because I hadn’t started as a professional actor yet. But it’s become one of my favourite all-time films.”
Withnail and I can definitely be a bleak experience the first time of watching, certainly without accompanying alcohol and before you’ve quite understood the joys of screaming “Monty, you terrible c**t” at your friends on a drunken night out. Starring Grant and Paul McGann, the 1960s-set film was adapted from an unpublished novel of Robinson’s, who originally had several leading British actors in the mix to play the lead role, including Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh.
One interesting piece of trivia about the movie is that it is one of the relatively few to feature a song licensed by The Beatles, namely ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. This was because not just one Beatle, George Harrison, was involved in making the film, but two, with Ringo Starr also being listed as a special consultant under his real name of Richard Starkey.
Lewis, meanwhile, spent the rest of the 1990s after graduating in a string of TV roles in the UK before he landed the historic Steven Spielberg HBO drama Band of Brothers, which has gone down as one of the finest television shows ever made. He won a Golden Globe nomination for his work on the series, and went one better when he picked up both the award for ‘Best Actor’ at the Golden Globes and an Emmy for ‘Outstanding Lead Actor’ for the Showtime series Homeland with Clare Danes.
His fourth Golden Globe nomination came for Wolf Hall in 2015, the adaptation of the Hilary Mantel trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII costarring Mark Rylance, which won a host of awards. Lewis will soon be seen in the WW2 drama Pressure with Brendan Fraser about a meteorologist forced to decide if it is safe for the Allies to proceed with the D-Day landings.
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