'It was the first picture we ever did': The inside story of Withnail And I
Paul McGann and Richard E Grant on the set of Withnail & I, which is getting a special screening at Cork International Film Festival. (Photo by Murray Close/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)
Has a film ever had quite so glorious an afterlife as Withnail and I? Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical account of two unemployed London actors going on holidays “by mistake” in the final weeks of the 1960s, crept into cinemas in January 1987, to little fanfare and indifferent reviews. Skip forward a decade, and it was a cult favourite beloved by students. Today, Withnail is rightly regarded as a classic – one of the finest British movies of the past half-century.
“It took a few years for that to happen,” says Paul McGann, the Liverpool actor who plays the “I” character in the film – a stand-in for the young Robinson and a foil of Richard E Grant’s maniacally irascible Withnail.
“It wasn’t instantaneous. It kind of disappeared – well, not disappeared without trace… But it wasn’t given a proper release. It took a while – 10 or 15 years before it found its audience. And now it has found its audience. You know, 30, 40, years later, people are still going up to see it and watching it multiple times. It’s a nice thing.”
Withnail’s status as one of the great black comedies – with its near-perfect mix of slapstick and pathos – will be celebrated at Cork International Film Festival when Robinson is to be presented with the festival’s first-ever Disruptor Award by McGann, following a screening and Q&A (at Triskel Cinema on Tobin Street).
“I’ve never been to that festival. I’m really looking forward to that,” says the actor. “I haven’t seen Bruce Robinson for years. I’m definitely looking forward to that.”
Withnail and I is a lock-in to be in the first line of the obituaries of all involved. It was McGann’s debut movie, and while he has gone on to a rich and varied screen career on the – mostly notably as the “Eight” Doctor in Doctor Who – to many, he will forever be Marwood, as the “I” character is referred to in the screenplay (he is never named on screen). The same can be said for Richard E Grant, who has starred in comic book adaptations and period dramas and received a 2019 Oscar nomination – but to many will always and forever be the arch, unhinged, lighter-fluid guzzling Withnail.
The film’s magic resides in its hilarity but also in its expertly-evoked ennui as the story marks the end of the hope-filled 1960s and the dawning of the dark, drab 1970s. Drawing on Robinson’s experiences as a struggling actor in London, it sees McGann’s and Grant’s characters embark on a series of outrageous escapades – most notably that “accidental holiday” in the UK’s Lake District, where they fall foul of Withnail’s touchy-feely Uncle Monty (the late Richard Griffiths, the only experienced thesp in the cast).
There are catch-phrases aplenty: “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake”, “A coward you are Withnail, an expert on bulls you are not”, “We want the finest wines available to humanity. And we want them here, and we want them now!”.
It’s that japery that has made the movie beloved by students – who can identify with the characters’ genteel impoverishment and their determination to live their best dissolute lifestyle despite abject destitution.
But along with the hilarity, the film is deeply melancholy. Robinson based the character Withnail on his acting friend Vivian MacKerrell – a charming, tragic gadfly who shared a flat in Camden in London with Robinson when both were students at the Central School of Speech and Drama. MacKerrell was a dazzling talent but doomed to burn brightly and fade away: Robinson would confirm that the scene in Withnail and I in which the parched Withnail drinks lighter fluid is based on an incident in which MacKerrell drank the liquid and went blind for three days.
MacKerrell died in 1995, aged 50, having contracted pneumonia while on a bender (having been diagnosed with terminal cancer). By then, he had long since squandered his talent – a sad fate hinted at in the conclusion to Withnail and I when Marwood is cast in a play in Manchester. He and Withnail say their farewells in Camden, both understanding their time as housemates is at an end, their friendship along with it. The relationship cannot withstand the crippling pressure of one of the pair becoming a success. The film ends with Withnail, wine bottle in hand, trudging alone through the rain.
“I remember Bruce saying it when we were screening it in 1987. He said to us, almost prophetically, he said : ‘Some of these audiences, even the invited audiences they were they were testing it on… some people are going to look at it and they’re probably going to just switch off’,” says McGann.
“They’re going to walk. They’re never going to see it again. And some people are going to see it, they’ll look at it, and they’ll watch it twice. And then they’ll watch it more than twice, he said. They’re going to laugh and then partway through, they’re going to twig that in it’s the saddest fucking thing. Which, of course, is exactly right. It’s so poignant, and yet, despite yourself, you laugh all the way through.”
Robinson saw it as a tragicomedy in which the tragedy eclipsed the comedy. Early in production – bankrolled by George Harrison’s HandMade Films – he urged McGann and Grant to refrain from playing their characters for laughs. Withnail and I wasn’t a farce — the humour came from a place of profound darkness.
“He said to us on the first day’s rehearsal, he said, ‘Boys, no jokes in this yeah’. He said, ‘Forget trying to play a punch line. If you play like a punchline, I’ll punch you’… kind of thing. He said, ‘Play it for real and then it’ll work’. It’s deeply, deeply sad. But that was deliberate.”
There is a Withnail character or two in everyone’s life, believes McGann. We’ve all met that individual full of charisma but incapable of living in the real world. We are drawn to them until we become repelled as we grow older and wiser and begin to understand the way of things.
“There’s a real real poignance. Bruce would say to us [about the final scene]: ‘It’s the end… It’s the end of everything’. This is the central relationship. It’s like a marriage. You know, it’s over. They can’t stay together. The kid can’t stay with Withnail. Down the years, I’ve spoken to lots of people who’ve seen it and liked it. We talked about it. With younger people, I’ll say, ‘Well, what is it about it?; And they’ll go, ‘Well, we’ve lived in that flat, or we’ve had that mad time, or we’ve taken those drugs, or, you know, whatever’.
“But then one will say, ‘Oh yeah I met that fella’. You’ll meet some mad natural talent. He’s better than you. He’s more talented than you. Withnail is brilliantly talented… But you’re meant to understand quite quickly that he’s too fucked. He’s too nuts. He’ll never ever do anything with it. It’s the other kid, it’s the steady Eddie – that was Bruce Robinson [and Marwood]. It’s the quieter kid – he gets the gig.”
Robinson was a storied stage and screen actor and an accomplished screenwriter who had received an Oscar nomination for his script for The Killing Fields in 1984. But he had never directed before and brought to Withnail and I the same raw, naive quality as McGann and Grant, aged 26 and 27, were appearing in their first film.
“It was his first movie. Well, you may have read this somewhere, and it’s true because I was there in the room on the first morning, on the first Monday morning, he assembled a whole crew, 40-50 people, whatever it was. We were up at the cottage in the Lake District. He stood on a chair in this room, and he addressed everybody. He said, ‘Look, I’ve written it’. He said, ‘I’ve been in pictures’,” remembers McGann.
“You know, he’d done pictures as an actor. He said, ‘I’ve never shot one – so help me out’. He made this little speech, and they loved him for it. And we did have a few difficulties, particularly in the first couple of weeks.
"It was a situation that I don’t think I’ve ever found myself in. You’re working with a director – a first time director – who’s written the thing and who absolutely knows the thing inside out. That is really, really rare.”
McGann grew up in a Liverpool Irish community and attended a Christian Brothers school. He’d had some experience as an actor before Withnail. But the world of impoverished luvviedom it portrayed was not his natural milieu — he came to it as an outsider.
“They were meant to be students, weren’t they? They weren’t even meant to be professionals. The story is set in the '60s. It was written during a time when Robinson was sharing this house with the Central School students. And as you see, the kid gets a job. And Withnail doesn’t. There’s some lovely piss-takes in there. John Gielgud [the famed West End actor] is mentioned. Luvviedom is properly skewered, but affectionately.”
Shooting Withnail and I was a big deal for McGann – who had dreamed of breaking into cinema. But he had no clue that the film would take on a life of its own and be beloved by generations.
“It was the first picture we ever did. Me and Richard and Ralph Brown, who played the drug dealer. We’d never done a picture. We had done a bit of telly. In those days, at least – and I’m sure it still is for young actors – if someone put you in a picture, that’s what you wanted to happen. We were ambitious – but it was a step up. You had to be invited. I felt like a big deal. That was the excitement of doing it. I can honestly say even that if it had just been a film that we did, and few people ever watched it, it still would have been an exciting thing. The spirit that we enjoyed it in and the spirit we made it in – it’s difficult to repeat.”
- Paul McGann will present Bruce Robinson the inaugural Honorary Disruptor Award at Cork International Film Festival’s at a screening of Withnail and I at Triskel Cinema, Cork, Tuesday, November 12 at 8.30pm
