The Finest Wines

The Cult of Richard E. Grant’s Withnail and I Is Finally Having Its Moment

After decades of obsessively quoting Bruce Robinson’s 1987 comedy, Gen Xers are using Grant’s Oscar nomination as an excuse to teach a new generation to demand the finest wines available to humanity.

By Duff McDonald

February 1, 2019

Bruce Robinson’s script for his 1987 cult classic, Withnail and I, wanders effortlessly between the high (a Hamlet soliloquy) and the low (“You can stuff it up your arse for nothing and fuck off while you’re doing it!”). But it’s the incandescent performance of Richard E. Grant that sends the dark British comedy—about a couple of out-of-work actors—into the stratosphere of greatness.

So it’s less weird than it might at first seem that the movie which screened at New York’s Film Forum on Thursday night wasn’t the one that has earned Grant a best-supporting-actor Oscar nomination—Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy—but the one that forged his legend more than three decades ago.

Over coffee in Brooklyn, I asked Grant if he could tell when he read the script for Withnail and I that it was a role for the ages? “I knew it bone-deep,” he said. “It made me laugh out loud, it was so brilliantly written. Even the stage directions were hilarious. I had also been unemployed for nine months, too, so it was the best preparation I could have had for playing an embittered unemployed actor.”

Here’s the best part: Grant was only offered the role after Daniel Day-Lewis passed. “Thank God Daniel Day-Lewis turned it down,” Grant said. “That’s all that I can say. When I worked with him on Age of Innocence, I prostrated myself in his Winnebago and said, ‘Oh, Daniel, I owe you everything that’s happened to me!’ And it’s true.”

In 2017, Grant told the U.K.’s Country Life: “Not a day goes by without someone quoting Withnail and I at me.” He said there isn’t a film he quotes all day long, but he has his obsessions. Barbra Streisand is one. Perfume is another. (He has his own brand, Jack.) And he’s re-read Alice in Wonderland every year for the past 40 years. So he gets it.

For those unfamiliar with Withnail, which has always been more popular in Great Britain than in the United States, here’s a quick cheat sheet:

It’s a movie about the air of disenchantment that hovered in the winds of the late 1960s.
It’s about youth and ambition and recklessness and disappointment and the dissolution of relationships.
It was Richard E. Grant’s first film role.
Given that Grant served up one of the great comedic performances of all time, it is arguably the greatest performance of his career.
For the super-fan, a missed opportunity to reference Withnail and I is nothing short of personal failure.
For example, the only sensible way to respond to Grant’s Oscar nomination was to quote his own words from 1987: “Let’s celebrate. We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!”

Withnail was released in 1987, so its cult status is powered less by the people who lived through the 60s themselves than by those who spent the 80s and 90s grappling with similar stuff—namely, the long-shot odds and manic, emotional ups and downs that constitute life as a struggling artist.

Sometimes, actors hit the target perfectly for one slice of the audience in a way that sails by everybody else, so far off the mark as to be unnoticeable. That’s when you get a cult movie. Grant, 61, was born in 1957, and his most passionate fans seem to be (mostly male) actors and writers born between 1960 and 1975—among them Johnny Depp, Will Arnett, and yours truly. (Early in my career, I freelanced under the pseudonym Desmond Wolfe, lifted from this movie.)

Most of us watched Withnail on VHS tapes. And we celebrated when the Criterion Collection released the complete and uncut versions on DVD in 2001. By then, many of us had committed the original edit to memory.

The Withnail era ended almost as soon as it began. Bruce Robinson directed two movies in the wake of Withnail and I: 1989’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising (also starring Grant, also a cult classic), which shared stylistic sensibilities aplenty with Withnail, and 1991’s Jennifer 8, which did not. Grant, for his part, carried the Withnail sensibility into 1993’s Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a darkly comic gem that won the 1993 Academy Award for best short film. And that was it—a six-year stretch that ended 25 years ago. But the output was enough to sear Grant’s performances into the consciousness of a generation.

Johnny Depp (birth year: 1963) is a confirmed obsessive. When making the movie of his buddy Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary, in 2011, Depp did what nobody had been able to do since 1992—he convinced Bruce Robinson to direct another movie. Somewhere along the way, Depp also came into possession of the original 1969 manuscript of Robinson’s unpublished novel that was ultimately adapted into the screenplay and made into Withnail 18 years later.

Actor Will Arnett (birth year: 1970) is another unabashed Withnail worshipper; his Netflix show, Flaked, is sprinkled with gifts for the focused Withnail fan. (Example: in Withnail and I, Paul McGann’s character packs a copy of J. K. Huysmans’s Against Nature into a suitcase. Twenty years later, Arnett snuck a copy of the same book into a scene in Flaked.)

“I’ve literally seen it hundreds of times,” said Arnett. “When I saw [Richard] at a dinner last fall, I told him it was the most influential piece of art on my own career. He delivered the gold standard of tragicomic performance and it’s stood the test of time.”

Matt Walsh (birth year: 1964) is known to audiences today for his role as Mike McLintock in Julia Louis Dreyfus’s Veep, but he’s got his own cult following as one of the four original members of the Upright Citizens Brigade; Walsh is a pioneer of comedy’s contemporary improvisation scene.

What does he think when he thinks Withnail? “Witty dialogue and Jimi Hendrix playing as the lads watch a wrecking ball smash a building, and then get in a beat-up [Jaguar] and drive out of London with Withnail screaming out of the window, holding a bottle of scotch like he’s just come back from the war or something.”

Grant’s Withnail is, without a doubt, one of the most quotable characters in movie history. As is the movie itself: diehard fans can cite every single line from the opening to the closing credits. Walsh’s favorite is a line by Uncle Monty, played by the late Richard Griffiths: “It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when, one morning, he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.’ When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases. Don’t you agree?”

Owen Burke (birth year: 1971) who heads up TV for Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Productions, vividly remembers the effect the movie had on him. “My brother turned me onto it,” he recalled. “It totally resonated with the person I was at the time: in my 20s, trying to get stuff done, but also being a complete psycho and drinking all the time. For most of us, that was the last time in our lives when we were living in a way that both everything and nothing were on the line at once, with both modes being completely selfish. But it’s in the middle of it all that you figure out who you are and how you’re going to do it. And by it, I mean life.”

Burke’s favorite line belongs to Danny the drug dealer, played by Ralph Brown: “They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.”

Even Vin Diesel (birth year: 1967) has been spotted quoting Danny on British TV.

Of course, not every Withnail fan belongs to Generation X. Director Robert Altman (birth year: 1925) was a Withnail fan. He went on to cast Grant three separate times: in The Player (1992), Prêt-à-Porter (1994), and Gosford Park (2001). (Grant thinks it’s simpler than that: “Altman liked oddball-looking, pipe-cleaner shaped, long-faced actors from both sexes.” Lena Dunham cast Grant in Girls because she’d seen him in Spice World, not Withnail.)

And now, thanks to Grant’s Oscar nomination, a new generation is discovering Grant’s work. His character in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Jack Hock, doesn’t share much with Withnail other than a drinking problem and a knack for somehow staying lovable despite being a complete degenerate. (Did we mention that Johnny Depp is a fan?) They are different people, of different ages, with entirely different lives, in entirely different eras. At the same time, both movies wrestle with the eternal topics of maintaining artistic integrity, of wanting something so badly you can taste it, of the end of friendship, and of failure.

Grant’s performance in Withnail has been described as “elegantly wasted”—that’s the kind of thing you can only pull off in your youth; once you’re in your 30s or 40s, it’s no longer cute, and you’re nothing but a drunk. It takes some of us a little longer to realize that than others.

“Have you got soup?” Withnail asks his suffering roommate near the beginning of the movie, with typical pompous effrontery. “Why don’t I get any soup?” Why? Because sometimes, you just don’t. And then sometimes, after a while, you do. In the case of Richard E. Grant, the soup of total recognition took more than 30 years to cook up. But recognition is now being served.

After the screening on Thursday, an audience member asked, in a rambling style typical of such Q&A sessions, whether Grant even cared about being nominated for an Oscar after all these years.

Grant didn’t miss a beat: “Of course I do. And anybody who tells you that they don’t, I call them a fucking liar.” It was, in a word, pure Withnail.

This article has been updated.