Amazing new interviews!!!

Richard E Grant, Peter Sarsgaard – and The Observer

On a Monday in October, I visited a hotel in Richmond to meet the actor Richard E Grant, who lives in a grand house nearby. The house is well-known to Grant’s many Instagram followers, who are regularly invited inside via a series of videos he records from the property. Many of the videos focus on the loss of Grant’s wife, the respected dialect coach Joan Washington, who died in September 2021. The couple were married for 35 years and shared a daughter, Olivia, who is now a casting director. The weekend before Grant and I met, Olivia celebrated her marriage to the financier Florian Herbst at a glitzy, multi-flowered event held at her father’s home. Grant father-of-the-brided around in an elegant tux. Helena Bonham Carter grinned from the sidelines. But, as I wrote in a cover interview published in the Observer Magazine a few weeks later, the day was made bittersweet by Washington’s absence.

The videos Grant publishes about Washington – as well as his 2022 memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness, which charts Washington’s illness and Grant’s descent into loss – have made him almost as well known as an open authority on grief as he is an actor. Much of our time together concerned their relationship. At one point during our discussion, Grant admitted to writing to his wife every night. A longtime diarist, he now considers the writing of his diary to be a way of extending his marital relationship, which he referred to as a lifelong conversation. “I’ll describe what you look like,” Grant told me of that evening’s entry. “What you’re wearing. How old you are. Do you have kids. All of that. She would want to know what your accent is, because that was her speciality. She would ask, ‘What did Alex sound like? What is the shape of his mouth? Does it open when he talks?’”

Richard E Grant hugging a tree in Richmond, by Simon Emmett

Grant was born in Swaziland, now Eritrea, during the last gasps of Empire. When he was 10, he caught his mother “bonking” his father’s best friend. They were all in a car together; Grant had been napping in a back seat. Grant kept the secret to himself, and for a long time he was estranged from his mother, who left her husband and moved to South Africa. Grant spent the rest of his teenage years with his father, who slipped into alcoholism and became abusive. Partway through our conversation, Grant recalled pouring his father’s liquor down the sink in an attempt to nudge him into sobriety, only to suddenly feel the end of his father’s gun pressed against the back of his neck. Grant ducked and ran; his father pulled the trigger but missed, most likely because he was already drunk. When Grant recited the story, he was calm. What I found more shocking than the event itself was the fact that throughout our conversation, and in his memoirs, Grant insisted on his father being a good man – during the day, he said, his father was charming, clever, admired. When I referred to his father’s behaviour as abuse, Grant laughed dismissively. Then he went on to bemoan the rise of victim mentality.

You can read the interview here. I’d be delighted if you did. (There are lovely photos by Simon Emmett, including one of Grant hugging a tree [above].) You can read another of my recent interviews, with Peter Sarsgaard, here. Sarsgaard, who is married to the actor and director Maggie Gyllenhaal, with whom he has two daughters, is an exceptional character actor. We met to discuss his new film, September 5, which covers the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre through the viewpoint of the ABC television crew that documented the tragedy live. (Sarsgaard plays the ABC executive Roone Arledge, who might be responsible for the 24-hour news coverage we experience as normal today.) As with most actor interviews, our conversation began with talk around the film. But most of our discussion centred on Donald Trump, America’s president-elect, of whom Sarsgaard is not a fan. On election night, Sarsgaard had dinner with his wife and some of the couple’s friends, avoiding all screens and subsequently the election result, which he had considered inevitable. “I told myself, don’t look until morning,” Sarsgaard said. And then morning came.

Like Grant, Sarsgaard had an interesting upbringing. Born on a US airforce base, his early childhood was itinerant – the family moved frequently, often following his father’s work. For a time, Sarsgaard served as an altar boy. (Still now he takes communion, though he described himself as a non-practicing Catholic.) But his childhood was frequently disrupted by the moods of others. “I lived with a lot of very sensitive people,” he told me. “Mental illness was a real thing in my house. Around those people, in those types of potentially volatile situations, you want to keep everything chill. And I’m very good at it. I spent a lot of my time as a kid trying to read the minds of people who didn’t know their own minds.” Acting, he told me, gave him a route out of peril, which is a thing a lot of actors say. But in Sarsgaard’s case I believed it.

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I wrote both of these interviews against the backdrop of change – and chaos – at work. Last week, the Scott Trust and the GMG board agreed in principle to the sale of The Observer to Tortoise Media. The deal was agreed to while a large portion of Guardian and Observer journalists were on strike. Further strikes are due to take place this week. What is remarkable to me is that while all of the above goes on – while board decisions blot many futures with doubt and uncertainty – a relatively small staff at the Observer continues to put out excellent work.

What might that staff achieve with support?

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If you’ve read to this point, thank you – as ever, I appreciate it. Please share this newsletter with friends if you enjoyed it. Please unsubscribe if you hated it!

Alex

Meeting Ray Winstone, family man

Truly, I had a very nice time...

A couple of months ago I met the character actor Ray Winstone for tea and coffee. We sat at a booth in a restaurant linked to the London hotel he books whenever his work schedule requires him to stay overnight in the city. Winstone, who has been acting since the 1970s and who has created several unforgettable characters, was open and uninhibited – fine, sweary company. He presented to me as a committed family man keen to maintain links to his east London childhood: his accent is how you’d imagine it; he asks his three adult daughters to lunch every Sunday. But we also chatted politics. Winstone voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum, a decision we discussed at length. “I didn’t want the French telling me how to eat my pork chops, thank you very much,” he told me, winkingly. I presented Winstone’s populism in the interview, and it sparked reaction across social media from people on both sides of the political divide. In an interesting turn of events, several commentators accused me of being anti-working class. Sometimes it’s better not to look.

This meeting became an Observer Magazine cover story. You can read it here – please do. But for various reasons, most of all word counts, several topics of conversation could not be included. The first was that, partway through our conversation, Winstone admitted to lying in interviews, at least at the beginning of his career. “Years ago I used to make things up,” he said. “I told one journalist I was Scottish. He said, ‘Where was you born?’ I said, ‘Glasgow.’ I’d had enough. I was being rude, I shouldn’t have been. But it was printed.” The story made us both laugh, but it also made me grimace – this is a disconcerting thing for an interviewer to hear. Of the several stories he told me during our meeting, which were completely accurate, and which had been exaggerated? Does he really have Sunday lunch with his daughters every week? I sensed yes. But above all I got the impression Winstone sometimes gets bored of the sound of his own voice. Like most actors, he would prefer to forgo the press commitments that come with the release of a new project. When he told me that, recently, he has been taking part in video content that will be shared on social media as well as the usual print interviews, and that social media stars had been making him do odd young-person things on camera – day in, day out, for the past two weeks – I thought: fair enough, Ray.

Ray Winston at the Repton Boxing Club, east London. By Simon Emmett

The other thing was this: Winstone has a lot of beautiful things to say about marriage. He and his wife have been together for almost 45 years. When I asked what the secret to a long and fruitful relationship might be, he replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know, really. Its not always great, is it? But you work at it.” It was while talking about his family that he seemed most genuine. He went on, “It’s too easy to walk away nowadays. I’m sounding like my dad now. But you know what I mean? You’ve got to work at things. You’ve got to love. You have to do the gardening. If you ain’t been doing the gardening, you’re fucked. You’ve got to nurture things, even when you don’t want to, even when you’ve had a row, even when you want to fuck off.”

Winstone’s comments resonated, and for a while there was silence and I thought about doing the gardening. But then he changed his tune – became suddenly cheeky. “But why is it that we’re always wrong? I’m not always wrong. But we’ve got to say we’re wrong. Alright,” he went on. “You have to suffer that.”

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A work update

Since I last took to Substack, I’ve published interviews with Patrick Stewart, Robert De Niro, and the young British actor Leo Woodall. The interviews with Stewart and De Niro, which both broached the topics of fathers and fatherhood – my bag! – helped me make the shortlist for Broadsheet Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards, which is nice news.

As ever, if you read anything I write, thank you!

Peace and love,

Alex

Being literal in Greece

Is it a good thing that my children listen intently to absolutely everything I say?

Last week, my family and I visited a monastery built into a hillside on the Greek island of Paros. This is something we’ve done every year since my son was born, in 2016 — it has become a kind of pilgrimage. Because the monastery is west-facing and offers views across Paros’s primary bay and out onto several other Cycladic islands, it is a wonderful place to watch the sunset. But reaching it involves driving up a very steep, narrow road that switches back dramatically every few hundred metres. It is best to proceed with caution, which means that, unless you are very organised, set out very early, and arrive at the monastery while the sun is still high — perhaps the people that manage this don’t have young children — visitors end up catching most of the spectacle from their vehicles, arriving at the car park just as the sun drops behind the horizon and the island becomes suddenly, exquisitely dull.

While driving up recently, aware we were likely to miss most of the sunset, I pointed at the view and said to my family, “Drink it in, my friends.” This is not the kind of thing I say often — the “drink it in” bit especially —and it confused my children. Did I want them to look at the sunset? Or was I telling them to drink, in the literal sense, the chocolate milk we just bought from a supermarket? In the end, my son decided to stare out of the window and left his milk alone — he had the right idea. My daughter, who is nearly three, and who in the past few months has come alive with a bubbling character, also left her milk untouched. But she had understood my phrase differently: she began to slurp on the air around her, made a lot of big gulping noises, pointed out of the window, and said, “I drinking, Daddy. I drinking!” 

We were in Greece on holiday, and this was not the only time during our trip that one or both of my children took something I said literally. Here is another example. On the beach every day, my son would ask how long it would be until I came into the water with him. I would be reading a book, or drinking coffee, or perhaps just lying on a sun lounger hoping to escape consciousness for a moment. As an answer I would offer, “in a couple of minutes,” thinking this might be the end of things for a while. But no. 

“You mean two minutes,” my son would say.

“A few minutes,” I would say.

“You mean three minutes?”

Eventually I would relent, and something would have been agreed. And though my son doesn’t own a watch, and surely had no idea of the exact time we committed to our little arrangements, whenever those three minutes were up, lo and behold there he’d be, next to me again, hopping on the too-hot sand — and we would go for a swim.

Me at the beach, being called into the water

At the supermarket, I had told my children that the drinks we were buying were for us to drink at the monastery and not before, especially not in the car, which was an over-priced rental. When we reached the monastery my son opened his chocolate milk immediately — a full half-litre bottle; it is thick stuff — and he drank it so quickly, with so few breaths in-between swallows, that he soon got a tummy ache so painful he could barely walk. When I asked him why he had drunk all of his milk in one go, he pointed out that I had told him the milk was meant for the monastery, and he worried that if he did not finish the bottle then and there he would miss out — that as soon as we left the monastery the bottle would be taken from him, which is not something his mother or I would typically do.

At school my son is performing very well — truly, he gets excellent reports.

But sometimes I wonder…

And my daughter? She continued to drink in the view for a good while after she started, so that by the time we reached the monastery car park she had swallowed so much air I assumed she would get hiccups, which eventually she did. We moved on then to a viewing point — a small patio next to the monks’s lodgings. The patio is bordered on the view side by a small wall, and beyond the wall there is a 30 metre drop into rocky woodland. My son peered over the edge. Then he turned to me and asked, “Dad, if I fell down there, would I die?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Literally?” he asked. 

And I nodded.

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A work update

I interviewed the director Greta Gerwig recently. You can read it online here (https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/09/it-had-to-be-totally-bananas-greta-gerwig-on-bringing-barbie-back-to-life), and you definitely should. Gerwig is very smart, very funny. She is also very successful. Barbie, her most recent film, perhaps you have heard of it, has now taken over $1 billion at the box office. Only 28 directors have made over $1 billion at the box office previously, and Gerwig is the first woman to do so. Remarkable.

I begin this interview by describing an experience I had in a pub near to where I live. A stranger I got talking to was part of the team building the Barbie set, and he was very enthusiastic about it. (He showed me pictures.) What I didn’t write in the piece was that the stranger and I first met in the toilet, where he offered me cocaine. I declined, a decision he did not respect, but we became friends anyway. I assumed the enthusiasm he had for his work was down to the positive on-set atmosphere Gerwig is known to create. But it might also have been the drugs.

Peace and love,

Alex

Work update: Talking about sad things…

…to close friends and famous strangers

The other day, during a long walk to the high street near to where I live, my son asked if I could carry him on my shoulders. “I’m tired,” he said, which I believed to be true. “Me too,” I said, which was true but which he didn’t believe. Though I wanted nothing more than to hoist him onto my body, to have him be supported by me, in the end I shook my head to mean no. “You are six!” I said. “You are too big!” This was also true, though it is a truth I have recently been trying to ignore. How could he have become too big to be carried? I wondered. And along we walked.

Lately I have been writing a lot about fathers and sons, and how they support each other, and what happens when that support disappears. The writing has involved discussing trauma and grief with famous strangers. It wasn’t a strategic decision to write on these topics, it just seems to have happened, and the conversations have been as fulfilling as they have been exhausting. In November, for example, I interviewed the comedian Rob Delaney about the death of his four-year-old son, Henry. In December I interviewed the actor Rory Kinnear about the death of his 54-year-old father, Roy. Last month I interviewed the writer Michael Rosen about the death of his 18-year-old son, Eddie. And in the midst of these interviews I wrote about the loss of my own father, some 20 years ago, when I was only just emerging into adulthood, and how I might pass on some part of him to my children, whom my father never met.

Nobody likes it in the death pit, Greg (copyright SUCCESSION/HBO?!)

What have I learnt from these experiences? I don’t know, it was only three interviews and a minor slice of introspection, though I will comfortably say something simple and unoriginal, which is that these things are very hard, and that they don’t always get easier, at least not in the ways we might hope.

You don’t forget, is what I think I mean, though perhaps forgetting would be helpful.

Recently, a friend who is suffering through incredible tragedy right now — right now! It doesn’t switch off! It is happening now as I write this! — described their life before trauma as a kind of la-la-land. They were once free, but now they recognised they were not. And once they had left freedom behind, they could not return — they were forever unfree. (Delaney describes this feeling, less dramatically, as developing “a new capacity for pain”.) “I want to go back to living,” my friend said. We were walking together when they told me this. I said, obviously profoundly, “I think this is living.” And we laughed briefly at the absurdity it, of me having said an absurd thing.

There is trauma all around. Rob Delaney and Rory Kinnear and Michael Rosen know this. We know this. But what can we do other than get on regardless, taking the good when we can. A couple of years ago a friend said to me, “I think you should just forget about 2021.” I had told him about a trauma my family was experiencing, an event disassociated with the pandemic, and though I understood the sentiment of his remark, which was kind, I couldn’t do as he suggested. 2021 was the year my daughter turned one and began to speak. It was the year my son learnt to read. Though tragedy raged around us, how could I dismiss those events as things to be forgotten?

All this has forced me to wonder: would I return to la-la-land if I could? The answer, most days, is yes. I would have preferred the curtain that obscures real life not to have been drawn wide open, revealing it all. And though experiencing trauma will teach you skills that are helpful to learn as a human being — more empathy or whatever, which I suppose is beneficial when talking to friends and famous people about sad things — well, I would rather have less empathy.

On we go.

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As ever, thanks for reading. Here again are links to the four pieces I mention above: interviews with Rob Delaney, Rory Kinnear, and Michael Rosen, all cover stories at the Observer Magazine, and the piece about my father and my son, for the New York Times Magazine (which this week has an excellent story about the menopause by Susan Dominus).

In other news, I have just interviewed a famous comedian, a very funny, usually happy man who — what is wrong with me??? — I made cry. The interview will be published soon.

Peace, Alex x

Co-parenting my daughter…

…with my six-year-old son

At breakfast recently my son said to me, “Dad, it takes less than ‘One Mississippi’ to blink.” We were on holiday in Greece, and he was eating what he’d eaten every day that week, which is the same food I ate in Greece as a child: a kind of crispy toast that is popular locally and a glass of chocolate milk. To emphasise his point, my son looked at me and blinked demonstrably. “That was quick,” I said, of the blink, because it was. He nodded. Then my daughter, seeing what was going on, blinked too.

Spending so much time with my children over the summer holidays made me realise two things: (1) I love them very much, though they have no patience, are easily bored, do not do things correctly (which is to say they make a mess, throw things onto the floor, leave things underfoot), speak loudly and incessantly—they are kids; and (2) my daughter, who is almost two, has reached the age when she copies everything done by my son, who is six. If my son runs around a table as fast as he can, my daughter will do it too, bumping off furniture as she goes. When my son drinks juice, my daughter wants juice; when my son eats bread, my daughter wants bread. My son cannot have something without my daughter wanting to have the same thing. And if she does not have it quickly—a piece of apple, for example—she will rumble over to me or her mother and knock at our legs impatiently with her tiny balled fists, and point at the thing my son has until (this is always the way) she is given it too. 

This is troubling because my son can do things my daughter cannot. He can eat apple, no problemo. He can climb onto high objects and jump off them. He can launch down stairs without us worrying about him falling over and hitting his head.

My daughter can’t do any of these things. 

Of course she can’t jump off high objects. She can’t really jump at all.

But that does not trouble her.

When I say “No” to my daughter, she briefly stops what she is doing, raises her eyebrows, and looks at me as if to say: “You cannot stop me.” Most of the time she’s right: no matter what I say, I cannot stop her. If she has climbed onto a chair and is then attempting to make her way to another chair—why is she doing that? Because her brother did it—I will say “No,” she will freeze for a moment, do the thing she does with her eyebrows, and then carry on. I think of it now as an understanding between us: I shake my head seriously, she ignores me, we both know where we stand. The only time she stops doing something dangerous is when I physically remove her from a situation. Even then, she will try again later. 

I have to remove my daughter from dangerous situations several times daily. But I also now must do something else: I must ask my son not to do some of the things he does, in a bid to prevent my daughter doing them as well. This seems unfair—it is a curbing of his adventure—but what can you do. Now when my son climbs onto a chair and shapes to jump onto another, I have to plead, “Please, don’t do that, your sister…” and slyly nod over to my daughter, who is usually already watching him with relish, figuring out how she might do exactly the same thing. My son will frown and look at me with contempt. Then he’ll give me a hard stare that means, “it’s not my fault”—which it isn’t, he’s right. But again, what can you do.

Because we do this so often, I realised recently that my wife and I are co-parenting our daughter with our son, that his behaviour during the next few months will have an effect on his sister perhaps equal to the effect my wife and I will have. He doesn’t feed her like we do, or clothe her or change her nappy or lull her to sleep. But his actions, the things he does and says around her, are those his sister watches and listens to most closely, those she replicates, those that are becoming part of her character, a part of her, for how long who knows, perhaps forever.

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Work update: I have written an essay about my father and the Greek food he loved, and how I might pass his memory onto my children (who he never met) by cooking some of those dishes. I’ll share it when it is published. I’m also at work on a few big interviews, including one with a comedian who recently experienced a shocking series of tragic events, and who talks about it so bravely and unabashedly I am in awe.

As ever, thanks for reading.