'It was the first picture we ever did': The inside story of Withnail And I

In advance of his visit to Cork International Film Festival with Withnail And I director Bruce Robinson, the film's co-star recalls the adventures they had creating the cult classic 

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.