Richard E. Grant - With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant

Winter 1985

WANTED: BOY DANCERS IN DUBAI

NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

This ad appeared in the Stage newspaper in a prominent black box on the vacancies pages and probably still does. After nine months of resting, dancing in Dubai begins to seem like a serious option. I get to checking that the ad is still there every week with the vague panic that should they finally fulfil their dancing quota it will be withdrawn, and with it my last chance of keeping the Equity card.

At the close of Orwells BIG eighty-four, prospects had seemed swimming: a Plays and Players Promising Newcomer nomination, and a role in Les Blairs satire about advertising for the BBC, Honest, Decent and True. Having emigrated to England from Swaziland in 1982 and done waitering, farting around in profit share, the Fringe and a couple of stints in rep, this television break seemed the ticket. I had a sense that it would open up some possibility somewhere. The transmission date June 1985 became a fixed point, with every chip of hope stacked for the big gamble. It was then delayed by six months and I couldnt get out of bed. At least, not the day the news came.

Such is my state of mind that when I chance upon one of those magazine surveys that states your ideal body weight for your height and type, I realize that at six foot two, of medium build, I ought to weigh twelve stone rather than eleven. I hatch a plan to find a way to gain the poundage and pump the iron. My wife, Joan, whose patience is bubble-gum stretched by now, tells me about Dreas Reyneke, the body trainer who transformed Christopher Lambert into Tarzan for Greystoke. I discover he was from South Africa and grew up two hundred miles from where I did in Swaziland.

I have never drunk milk before, and its nausea-inducing niff mixed with weight-gain powder requires a nose-peg to get it down my gullet. But, gradually, flesh grows where only ribcage has mirrored back before. Dreas teams me up with his most macho body-building client, Richard La Plante, who sees my sand-in-the-face prospects as a challenge to overcome, and has me Tarzaning along the bars in no time. Im soon flexing and plexing my pecs in a T-shirt. The ritual of pumping and pushing gives some vague purpose to the week, and I spend the rest of the time either staring into space in the middle of a room or clacking out a play about the sexual shenanigans of life in colonial Swaziland, titled Bongo Bongo. It sits like an embarrassment in a lowly drawer and hasnt been looked at since.

Marooned, becalmed, beached and increasingly bleached of self-confidence, the magazine rack at my local W. H. Smiths provides some escape. You can stand there for half a day riffling and reading through all their publications. I sometimes make a mental inventory of fellow readers and regulars and assume that they, too, are among the 95 per cent, forty-thousand-odd unemployed members of Equity. Even Fishermans Monthly starts to seem subscribable. Finally I pay for a newspaper, to reassure myself that at least W. H. had earned something despite my liberties at the Rack. How can Richmond be so full of people during working hours? On any given day, youd swear that no one works at all. And Im not talking about the OAP gangs. The where is everybody going, and what for and why questions burn away. This existential reverie is interrupted all too infrequently by a call from my agent with news of an audition for something humiliating.

Know Frankenstein?

Yes well, Ive read it but not recently.

Got a pen? The BBC Religious Department are doing a drama-doc in Wales looking at the dialectics, I think thats what they said, of Faith and Medical Advances. Not quite sure, but theyre interviewing for monsters. On the fifteenth floor at TV Centre no, hang on, I think its the other building next to Shepherds Bush Theatre where they do Wogan. You know. Ill just check on that and call you right back.

Frankensteins fucking Monster. Has the woman lost her marble collection? Im the original eleven stone weakling (though the weight-gain powder is edging things out a bit). What the fuck can she be thinking?

I head for the building next to the Wogan theatre, and meet the director in a cramped office occupied by two typists, clacking out bulletins and contracts.

Would you mind taking off your shirt?

What, here?

Yes, sorry, but the normal interview room is being rewired.

This is a first. As my buttons obey, the two typers eyeballs shift briefly upwards without missing a beat. Standing in a room with three strangers, in fluorescent light, shirt off, being appraised for Franks monster by a stick-insect in a cardigan induces something like self-consciousness.

Thank you. Could you read a couple of pages for me?

My relief at buttoning up again is matched by the disappointment in his eyes my torso had clearly not been up to par. Thoughts of Why didnt you start the weight-gain powder at fourteen, boy, scurry round my skull.

In this scene, the monster argues with, and then attacks, the doctor. Just take your time and then have a go.

Will you be reading the doctor?

Yes, but I cant act so dont be put off. In your own time.

Even I am startled by the Exorcist gutturals that issue forth from my gizzard. Aside from Linda Blairs 360 degree head-swivels and green projectile vomitings, I am monstrous and possessed. The sound of typing stops. Eyes stare and when I drop the script-page and have both hands gripped round the directors neck, I feel primed to hop down to contracts and sign on the dotted.