When will Hollywood stop wasting Richard E Grant?
If you’ve seen Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there are several things that mighthave jumped out at you. There’s the pervasive horniness, of course, the enormous Victorian collars, and Tom Waits eating bugs. There is also Anthony Hopkins’ subtly creepy performance and Gary Oldman’s extremely unsubtle one. What you will probably not notice, however, is that Richard E Grant is in the film.
Playing the thanklessly dull and peripheral role of the lovesick doctor who sounds the alarm on Lucy Westinra’s vampire bite, he performs the role to perfection, never showboating or stealing scenes, and delivering exactly the kind of bland decency that Stoker assigned to him in the novel.
Sadly, this character is far from unique for the actor. Chances are, if you’re seeing a movie that has Richard E Grant in it, your first and only impression will be that he is criminally underused. Even in Saltburn, a movie defined by excess and excess alone, Grant is the sole actor who is given an understated role. Though he is easily the most human and believable character in the film, he barely gets any screen time. More recently, he appeared in the HBO satire The Franchise, playing a self-important theatre actor who lowers himself to playing the villain in a superhero movie. Again, he is the best thing about the project, and again, he is criminally underutilised.
All of this begs the question: what in the name of Uncle Monty’s firm young carrots is wrong with Hollywood? Why does no one seem to be able to give Grant the roles he deserves? The actor burst onto the scene in 1987 with Bruce Robinson’s cult classic, Withnail & I. Playing an out-of-work actor with illusions of grandeur and a robust dependence on alcohol, he was magnetic – charismatic, tragic, and able to deliver mouthfuls of poetic dialogue with the ease of a Shakespearean specialist. Since then, however, he’s only been given a handful of roles worthy of his talents.
The obvious one is Marielle Heller’s 2018 drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? Starring Melissa McCarthy in a rare dramatic role playing a real-life author who forged letters by deceased writers to rescue her sputtering career, it features a showstopping supporting performance by Grant, who plays a social gadfly and the author’s old friend. Grant earned the best reviews of his career for the role and earned his first and only Oscar nomination. It was the perfect opening for a career renaissance, but somehow, it didn’t lead to more prominent roles.
In a more recent and maddening demonstration of his talents, Grant played a mercurial bestselling author in Alice Throughton’s 2023 drama, The Lesson. His character is cold, insecure, arrogant, and selfish, the patriarch of a grieving family harbouring dark secrets. He is, yet again, the best thing about the movie, and, again, has far too little time on-screen.
There is an argument to be made that Grant is simply a character actor – a performer who can do anything and disappear into any role – and is, therefore, better suited to adding splashes of colour to movies rather than taking on the part of a generic protagonist. But there are plenty of movies with entertaining, offbeat heroes, as Withnail & I demonstrated, and actors shouldn’t be punished with negligible parts just because they’re better at their jobs than everyone else. Meryl Streep certainly doesn’t seem to have that issue.
It is perfectly possible that Grant has chosen this path. Actors and their teams often pick roles strategically to avoid being typecast or to build towards a niche that they want to fill. Margot Robbie and Sydney Sweeney are excellent examples of this. So, if Grant has chosen to be an actor who flits through one film and onto the next, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that he is executing his goal flawlessly. But for those of us who feel starved of his presence the moment he walks off camera, the only hope is that someone, somewhere, will offer him the main role that he just can’t refuse. If not, we can at least be thankful that Withnail & I is infinitely rewatchable.
