Life is all about the role-play
WHEN Richard E Grant got the shout for his latest role, a short comic drama called The Other Woman, it was on a Thursday.
Filming was to begin the following Monday. “I said, ‘Who’s dropped dead or dropped out?’,” says Grant. “They said, ‘Nobody has. It’s all being cast at the last minute like this.’ From what I understand, the controller of the drama department at Sky had given them carte blanche and said, ‘Come up with something that’s half an hour long. You choose the writers. You choose the actors. We’ll finance it.’ For people to be given that kind of creative freedom is something I’ve never ever experienced.”
The short drama is part of Sky Arts’ ongoing Playhouse Presents series, which each week screens a different 30-minute drama. The Other Woman stars Geraldine James and Trevor Eave as a middle-aged couple struggling with issues of trust and fidelity. Their marital strife is then comically re-channelled into the scripts that Eave produces for the TV melodrama in which James stars. It’s all a bit ‘meta-drama’, but it’s certainly amusing. Grant plays James’s co-star; a man bemused by the sudden twists and turns his character takes, depending on how confessional Eave’s writing has become.
If it’s a slight work, The Other Woman is surprisingly touching in how it treats the idea that identity is something performed, that each of us is just a carousel of self-projections that wax and wane, depending on our environment.
Grant agrees that the latter is a basic truth of human relationships. “Even if you’re not an actor, the persona that you may have when you’re meeting a bunch of mates in a pub is going to be different to the persona you’ll have in front of your mother-in-law, or with your family, or at work,” he says.
“They’re all adjustments or variations on the same thing. There is role-play in what you do in everyday life.”
Grant grew up in Swaziland, where his father was Minister of Education in the ’60s, but he has been a fixture of English film and television drama for 30 years.&
Notably, a few years ago, the actor stepped behind the camera to direct Wah-Wah, a film based on his own childhood in Swaziland. Written by Grant, the film recalled, with unflinching detail, his parents’ failed marriage and its impact on his life as a child. It includes a scene where the 10-year- old Grant, in the wake of his parents’ split, constructs a small shoebox theatre of his own in which he re-enacts his parent’s break-up. This was a moment of role-play, Grant says, from which his desire to act took off.
“Everything that happened in the film really happened and it’s mostly filmed in the places where it did happen. So, yeah, I can trace it back with a clear mind to there, from making shoebox theatres to then buying marionettes and progressing from there through school plays to drama school. When I look back on it, there’s an arrow-like trajectory.”
His parents’ separation left him with an insatiable curiosity about human behaviour, says Grant. “It all comes down to my basically being what the Australians call a ‘sticky beak’ or what others call a nosey parker,” he says. “I’m just very, very curious about how everything works.”
It has also earned him a reputation as a man who will say point blank what he feels. “Oh gosh, that’s true,” laughs Grant. “I’m terrible at hiding it if I think someone is a total arsehole or is boring the pants off me.”
His frankness, he says, stems from placing a high value on saying what you mean and upon meaning what you say. It doesn’t necessarily rhyme very well with his adopted homeland, however.
“Being an outsider in England, it took me a while to realise just how adept the English are at doublespeak,” he says. “Just as an example, people say, ‘Oh you must come and visit’. But when I first arrived here three decades ago I used to take them literally, and then I’d realise when I’d see the shock on their faces that they were going, ‘Oh fuck, we didn’t really mean that you should really turn up and ask for a meal. Shag off.’” Happily, they haven’t got shot of him yet.
* Richard E Grant stars in the drama The Other Woman, tonight 9pm Sky Arts 1HD and Sky Go.
