Episode 960 - Richard E. Grant / Brian Posehn
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck tuckians?
Marc:I don't know why I'm focusing on you.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:What's happening out there?
Marc:The paperback of Waiting for the Punch is now available in stores, folks.
Marc:Or you can go to markmarinbook.com and order a copy from wherever you like to order books.
Marc:Also, the Across the Divide event.
Marc:The Across the Great Divide event is tomorrow night, Friday the 19th.
Marc:I'm going down to the Ace Hotel.
Marc:I'm hosting the thing.
Marc:I got to get that together, the hosting.
Marc:What kind of funnies do I want to make?
Marc:Then I got to bring up all the acts, including Bob Weir, Lucinda Williams, John Prine, Jimmy Vavino, the musical director.
Marc:He's cajoled me.
Marc:talked me into uh playing a song that i played with him before but slash is going to be uh sitting in on that song as well i discussed this with you before i'm going in i'm going full throttle i practiced a bit i know i got this problem with my arm and my fingers my other hand my picking hand the nail is uh seems to be uh not falling off i can hold the prick a prick
Marc:Let's not assess that too deeply.
Marc:I can hold a pick pretty well, pretty well.
Marc:You know, I got the strength back in it, so I'm going to go in, I'm going to do it.
Marc:But boy, did I have a waffling, I just was waffling confidence-wise all day yesterday.
Marc:You know when you get that...
Marc:slight sinking feeling you know a slight heaviness in the heart maybe your stomach feels a little pulled upon a mild kind of tinge of the depression that just makes you feel like you're not good enough to do anything yeah i had that for a few hours and then i just leaned into the guitar and i'm just sort of like get it out get it out man
Marc:Worked on my stand-up a bit.
Marc:Yeah, I have a bit of a, that's where it came from.
Marc:You know, like I can't just admit
Marc:They're like, hey, man, I'm a little nervous about this shit coming up.
Marc:I'm a little scared.
Marc:I got to play guitar with Slash.
Marc:I got to host a big event with some big musical acts, which, you know, should be fun.
Marc:But I'm just sort of like, oh, fuck, what am I going to do?
Marc:And then I'm going to New York to shoot the Joker movie with De Niro and Joaquin with that scene.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, my God.
Marc:But I'm excited about it, but I have to assume that somewhere under the excitement and the actual feeling of groundedness around this stuff, there exists the ever-flowing wellspring of fear and insecurity that I keep underground.
Marc:It's a subterranean well.
Marc:I put some concrete over the hole that it used to flow through into my being.
Marc:But every once in a while, you know, it just there'll be a little fissure.
Marc:There'll be a fissure and then it starts seeping out.
Marc:They just like this, the the fluid, you know, you can't do this.
Marc:You're not going to pull it off.
Marc:Don't pretend like you're you can handle this.
Marc:You you suck.
Marc:Just a little just kind of oozing out of this fissure.
Marc:I'm excited is what I'm trying to say.
Marc:I can't wait to do the stuff I have ahead of me.
Marc:You know, things are tough in the world.
Marc:My world is okay.
Marc:I got some opportunities.
Marc:I'm looking forward to it.
Marc:It's going to be fun, right?
Marc:I don't know, man.
Marc:It's like, you know, you're going to pull it off?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:Don't talk to me like that.
Marc:Today on the show, I talked to character actor Richard E. Grant.
Marc:You know him from a lot of things.
Marc:Famously, Whitnail and I, and those were the early movies, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, but he was in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Marc:He's been the player.
Marc:He's been in a lot of stuff, but he's here to talk about this movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, with Melissa McCarthy, which I thought was very good.
Marc:Melissa's doing a serious role.
Marc:It's based on a true story about forgery and desperation, and I enjoyed it, but I was fascinated to talk to Richard E. Grant because he's one of these guys that he's always very intense and slightly morally dubious in movies and
Marc:He's got quite a presence.
Marc:I didn't know what kind of person he was.
Marc:Is he going to just tumble in here like Richard Burton after a bender?
Marc:No, quite the opposite.
Marc:Great talk, though.
Marc:Enjoy talking to him.
Marc:Brian Posehn is here as well for our last, I believe, our last shorty, as I call him.
Marc:Brian Posehn doesn't know it, but he's the last of the short-form interviews that we do occasionally here.
Marc:What can I tell you about Brian Posehn?
Marc:I've known him since he was a youngster, it seems.
Marc:We started out sort of together years ago.
Marc:I remember him when he started.
Marc:He's got this memoir coming out, Forever Nerdy, My Dorky Dreams and Staying Metal, that comes out next week, actually, October 23rd.
Marc:You can preorder it right now.
Marc:And we had this talk over the summer when we were still doing these shorter interviews, and we held it until we were closer to the book coming out.
Marc:And it was fun.
Marc:And it was it was good.
Marc:Brian's an evolving guy.
Marc:I've known him a long time.
Marc:So it was a great little reconnect.
Marc:So this is me and Brian Posehn.
Marc:How are you feeling?
Marc:So your wife told you to get rid of all the things on the phone?
Guest:Well, yeah, because it was driving me crazy.
Marc:Like it was affecting your life, you couldn't get out of the phone.
Guest:I'd just wake up angry and sad, and that would be the first thing I'd go to, and then whatever I read would set me off in that direction, and if it was a positive thing, then I would lay all my, you know, oh, that's going to happen, now he's out of here, he's gone, yeah.
Guest:And now it doesn't happen.
Guest:Fucking nothing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then I'd get mad, and...
Guest:right like but i started off the election uh um on that like on that uh just kind of not believing that it was even happening right sure the night that it happened yeah once it started to turn around and go the other way i went to bed i went to bed around 10 o'clock right and i was just pissed off and right poor kid uh could sense my energy yeah because i can't really hide things how old was he then
Guest:He, uh, he was seven then.
Guest:And, uh, like he drew a picture of Trump and like the bird shitting on him and like to try to make me happy.
Guest:But it was already over for me.
Guest:I was just like, I can't believe this is, I'm going to go try to sleep.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then the last two years had just been, uh, well, you know, writing the book, but then, and I talk about at the end of the book, uh,
Guest:how hard it was to write while I was that pissed off and that worried and that sad and, you know, just going highs and lows.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And writing about, you know, my life.
Guest:Yeah, with the highs and lows.
Guest:Trying to reflect on these things while I'm, you know, also self-medicating with whiskey and weed and, you know, trying not to kill my family.
Marc:You're back on the weed and whiskey?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It works.
Marc:Well, I mean, it took the edge off, huh?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So everything was falling apart, and then you had to go back into the childhood.
Marc:But did that, was there, the book is called Forever Nerdy, Living My Dorky Dreams and Staying Metal.
Marc:Like, I find that when I write, I hate it primarily.
Marc:And that, like, the last book I did on my own,
Marc:It was a real chore, and it's time-consuming, and it hangs over you.
Marc:Even if I'm writing about myself, it's sort of like, oh, but I still got to write it.
Marc:But there are those moments where you go on these runs where there's a sense of discovery, and all of a sudden you see things in a way that you didn't see them before.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Did you have that experience?
Guest:There were a couple of things.
Guest:There were a couple of things of stuff where... And I even talk about it in the book where I'm like, oh...
Guest:My mom was a virgin when she met my dad.
Guest:That's weird.
Guest:Ew.
Guest:Like, I kind of put things together that I'd never thought, you know, like.
Marc:As a grown-up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Because, like, there's still so much of your mind is, because of your parents, is locked in child minds.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And you'd refuse to see them.
Guest:And I was just kind of going through the whole thing, and I'm like, oh, I don't think she, yeah.
Guest:And then the mom's boyfriend after that, and I was like, oh, she's really only had these three guys.
Guest:Stop thinking about that.
Guest:You had to reel it in?
Marc:That was one of the things.
Marc:You're seeing your mom too much as a person?
Guest:Yeah, and I was also, I felt bad for her because I was, because I don't have a dad, so pretty much everything in the book is kind of blamed on her.
Guest:And then she moved down here during, she moved down here last November, so I was finishing this up
Guest:and i'm forced to be around her all the time when i'm writing about her right and i felt like guilty but like there's so much of that already in the book yeah you know did you put that in there that you're feeling that did that she that was already in there no no uh i barely talk about that yeah i mentioned but well what did you made it harder because i'd see her right and i'd just written about something about how pissed off i was about this shitty thing she said 30 years ago or whatever that still is stuck in my brain like what
Guest:Oh, just, you know, stuff about the dad kind of, you know, when I would say to her, or when I was a teen, you know, and I thought maybe the situation would have been better if my dad had lived, she'd say stuff like, you know, he wasn't that into the idea of you, you know, when you were born.
Guest:He wasn't pro-Brian, and he's not that great of a dude.
Guest:She would just throw him under the bus, and it just made me hate her, too.
Marc:It's weird, though.
Marc:In her twisted mind, she was probably trying to help.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How did he die again?
Guest:He died of a rare blood disease.
Guest:Right.
Guest:negligence at the hospital, and my mom didn't do anything about it.
Marc:But did she know?
Marc:You haven't resolved this stuff.
Marc:You're supposed to maybe process this stuff.
Guest:I didn't think we were going to get this deep this quick.
Marc:But I mean, what, you forgot who you were talking to?
Marc:We were just on your porch.
Guest:You tricked me into this.
Guest:We were just, you were greeting me with a cigar.
Guest:We were looking at shit.
Marc:Boom.
Marc:Mom.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, no, but like, but were you, did you find, well, it is a memoir and I have experience with that.
Marc:And I also have experience with alienating a parent because of what I wrote.
Guest:Oh, she's going to flip.
Guest:But I turn it around because our relationship is mostly positive now.
Guest:And she was super supportive of comedy.
Guest:And that's the one thing.
Guest:And I make a big point of that in the book of going,
Guest:Look, the high school years were rough.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But once I found this thing that I loved, she realized that, you know, even though she didn't think it was awesome, she didn't laugh at what I was doing, but she thought, you know, saw that I loved it and saw that I had some sort of skill with it.
Marc:And also that you were probably out among people.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Not down in the basement with a bunch of nerds playing a game.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:Like he seems to be out in the world.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And that must have been the, thank God.
Marc:For sure.
Marc:So you go all the way back.
Marc:You do the whole thing.
Guest:I wasn't going to.
Guest:When I was going to write, when I started, I had the idea.
Marc:Why'd you do it?
Marc:Was it your idea or did somebody say like, why don't you write a book?
Guest:Yeah, I'd written some blurbs for some friends of ours.
Guest:It wasn't Stanhope, but it was the same editor that's worked with Stanhope.
Guest:And I'd done a blurb for Rex Brown's book.
Guest:He's the bass player for Pantera.
Guest:And then I'd done one for one of Scott Ian's.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Nice guy.
Guest:So that editor said, hey, man, if you have a book in you, we'd love to hear it because he liked what I had written just in the blurbs.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:You clearly can write.
Guest:You got to break through blurbs.
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then instead of going through my agency and having them shop it, when I came up with the concept, I just went to this guy.
Guest:I said, look.
Guest:You know, you've done Madel and comedy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this is, you know, that's me.
Guest:That's me.
Guest:So do you want to hear it?
Guest:He loved it.
Guest:And then we just went through Decapo and it was easy instead of getting my, you know, my agent got involved then once I had sold it on my own.
Marc:Right, oh, that's great.
Marc:Yeah, that's what they do.
Guest:That was kind of the way I wanted to do it, though.
Guest:But I didn't mind because I didn't want to go through the other process of them trying to take me around to all these places.
Guest:Bidding wars and that kind of thing.
Guest:Well, there wouldn't have been.
Guest:In my head, everybody was going to go, nah, we're good.
Guest:Yeah, we'd ride those.
Guest:I didn't want to go through that kick in the nuts.
Guest:I'd rather go to somebody who was into it.
Marc:And they just came in to negotiate.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and then take their 10.
Marc:Right.
Marc:We're here.
Marc:So you got everything done?
Marc:Great.
Marc:We'll put the paperwork together.
Marc:Right, which is fine.
Marc:Yeah, no, it's what they do.
Marc:That's what I wanted.
Marc:Yeah, no, I'm not criticizing them.
Marc:That's the way the business is structured because we don't know how to handle money.
Marc:No, no.
Guest:So it originally started as kind of I was just going to do essays.
Guest:No, I was going to do essays about my life.
Guest:That's what I did.
Guest:Yeah, the last one.
Guest:And then I just, when I started writing about the first 10 years, because I talk about nerdiness, but I also, and I've talked about it in my act, how I think...
Guest:you're not born a nerd.
Guest:You find it, you might be born with OCD, which plays into it.
Guest:But to me, it started at 10 years old, but then I talk about those first 10 years, and I talk about the darkness, the death,
Guest:That kind of stuff.
Marc:And what was your original obsession to start defining the nerd?
Guest:The first one I say in the book is Jaws.
Guest:And then the first bit after that was Star Wars.
Guest:That was it?
Guest:Jaws was paled by how massively I got into Star Wars and how obsessed I got.
Guest:And then Kiss was right around the same time.
Guest:It was Kiss and Star Wars were my first two things.
Guest:That's a pretty good trifecta.
Marc:Jaws to start.
Marc:You know, and then boom, the machine.
Guest:And it all within 76, 77, within like two years that, you know, I was.
Marc:And you're able to track it to like, you know, handling grief and the sadness and the isolation of the dad thing and of being awkward in general.
Marc:It's almost like a nerdism.
Guest:is almost like it can be like a religion yeah because like you know you find these things that you know define you and are massive right you can sort of turn your life over to them well i even say yeah i say in the book that uh to me nerdiness is just about obsession and i even think religion is they're just jesus nerds no and they're cosplaying is
Marc:A little more dangerous in general.
Marc:The cultural implications of Christian cosplay could end the world.
Marc:I think that's true.
Marc:I thought that about just ritualistic religions like Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Catholics, that the idea of all these arcane rituals is an OCD.
Marc:It's an organized method to sort of keep you connected to this thing.
Guest:and you get and you have to do it right and it's funny i even talk about i was christian until i kind of around it's not like i left christianity yeah now i'm into star wars instead yeah but it kind of happened around the same time well yeah and where i got more into metal and i got you know when people were shitting on kiss and stuff like i was like kiss is not knights and seat and service it's
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, right.
Guest:It's two Jewish guys and an Italian dude, and another guy, whatever Fraley is.
Guest:In clown makeup.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:No, but I think that's true, because for kids, certainly, and I think it happens now, too, with gaming and stuff, it's present, it's accessible, it's engaged, and it's now.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:It's not like some sort of hypothetical.
Marc:It's like, I see Luke Skywalker, you know, right?
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, so that's where it started, and then you kind of moved through the life?
Guest:Yeah, and then comedy, finding, you know, it's about all the different obsessions.
Guest:Were you a D&D guy too?
Guest:I wasn't at first, and I talk about that, so in junior high,
Guest:I heard about it and I was like, oh, this seems like something I would love.
Guest:But there was already a kid that I hated at Sunday school.
Guest:He was like the Christian bully, which is so weird.
Guest:Like he would fuck with me.
Guest:It kind of was because he was the one guy that was like that.
Guest:I felt like at Christian camp and at...
Guest:Sunday school and a church group and all those places.
Guest:I felt pretty safe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Except for this one dude.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I showed up at D&D and he sees me.
Guest:I walk into the room.
Guest:You know, it's D&D club in seventh grade.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm like, oh, this is going to be my place.
Guest:I open the door.
Guest:He sees me and goes, Posehn, what are you doing here?
Guest:And I'm like, oh, man.
Guest:I can't even be into this.
Guest:And then I just went to the library, and I talk about that in the book.
Guest:I worked in the library in junior high and high school.
Marc:And that guy is now a congressman.
Guest:Probably.
Guest:He's a Facebook friend, and I try to.
Marc:Oh, is he?
Guest:He asked me.
Marc:So you guys all right?
Guest:I've changed his name in the book.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:You got it.
Guest:There's a lot of that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah, you have to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you don't get in trouble, and you can just write about it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But so that guy was sort of the bane of your existence?
Guest:Well, at church camp, yeah, at Sunday school, there was plenty of dicks at high school and junior high.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And isn't that like sort of the thrust of the story is that, you know, how you, you know, were isolated because of things that were sort of out of your control, you know, and you had to sort of cloister with the other freaks.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then like, you know, at some point, you know, because there was a shift in culture, you were able to own it.
Guest:Yeah, well, I talk about that, definitely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And how I'm not bitter about it either.
Guest:Because there's a ton of bitter nerds that are like, hey, I didn't have the, there weren't hot girls wearing the I Heart Nerds shirt.
Guest:And I'm like, well, it is what it is.
Guest:And it worked out for me.
Guest:I'm not mad about the girls that didn't fuck me still.
Guest:You're just mad about your mom.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You go to the source.
Guest:For making me unfuckable.
Yeah.
Guest:It's her fault.
Marc:Yeah, that one is all her fault.
Marc:It's all her fault.
Marc:Yeah, so, I mean, but I remember, like, and we talked about this the first time we talked.
Marc:I mean, there was, I remember the shift.
Marc:Like, it's weird because when I see guys do it now, I think they're kind of late.
Marc:I don't want to mention anyone's name.
Marc:But I remember, like, you shifting from long hair metal dude to,
Marc:to guy wearing glasses with a good haircut and beard thing.
Marc:It was a very distinct shift.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right, you know what I mean?
Guest:Well, it didn't happen.
Guest:It wasn't like I went, I'm going to be this guy.
Guest:No, no, no, I know.
Guest:The hair was the girlfriend at the time and her friend.
Guest:What do you call it when people gang up on you?
Guest:Intervention.
Guest:They showed up and said, you're cutting your hair today and we're taking you to a different clothing store and you're going to turn this shit around.
Guest:Because all you wore were t-shirts and a hat sometimes.
Guest:Yeah, pretty much.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I looked like I still worked at a skateboard shop, which was my last day job.
Guest:Well, record store was my last day job.
Guest:Right.
Guest:My last two day jobs were skateboards and record stores.
Marc:But it was right around like the Mr. Showtime.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Where you're sort of like, oh, look at Brian.
Guest:Yeah, and it was also like, David Cross looks good with a bald head.
Guest:I should just do what he's doing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think maybe I co-opted the beard from Louie.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:I feel like there were other guys that were doing the bald head beard thing.
Guest:Or at least, because I experimented with goatees.
Guest:I used to have the Pearl Jam thing back when I knew you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When I had long hair, but then I had just the flavor saver.
Guest:No mustache.
Guest:And I grew it, nothing.
Guest:Just the flavor saver.
Guest:And I grew it long.
Guest:Like, what the fuck?
Guest:Like, I thought I was a stone gossard.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You have that.
Guest:You have to be defined by something.
Guest:But then talking about nerdiness came from also me wanting to be less brick road or brick, not brick road, brick wall.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is what I had kind of been lumped in.
Guest:Like I was finding in the alternative scene in LA where I would show up at some of those shows and they'd go, no, you know, you're an improv guy.
Guest:You're a mainstream comic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I won't name some people, but there's people that ran some of those rooms that were like,
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, Patton fits.
Guest:This other guy fits, but you don't fit.
Marc:But we all started.
Guest:And so then- Me, you, Blaine, we all started in- Most of the people that- Most of us were brick wall comics- Of course.
Guest:Before we found that, you know.
Marc:That was because that was all there was then.
Guest:Yeah, and Patton had his suit in his first-
Marc:you know oh yeah his first eight by ten you know we did all those things that alley shot but you know what i mean like we did those things we had business cards and eight by tens like yeah because we all the comics in the 80s did right because we came in a little earlier like we were all like probably you know middles or headliners by the time all comedy started right but you've been writing for a long time i remember because like i was a bitter cunt then you know like i
Marc:When I saw Mr. Show, I'm like, what the fuck?
Marc:What are all these guys who just get the TV show?
Marc:And you're on there.
Marc:I'm like, Posehn's on there.
Marc:How is this happening?
Guest:I got that gig, I think, because Bob loved that I didn't give a fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, Bob and I met one time.
Guest:He knew who I was, and I knew who he was through David.
Guest:I knew David first.
Guest:Cross was coming up to San Francisco a lot.
Guest:before I moved down here, and so when I moved down here, they'd already done Stiller, and so they were looking for the next thing, and they were starting to write sketches together, and they were friends.
Guest:And then I met at that old Virgin Megastore,
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was wearing a sub pop jacket that said loser on it.
Guest:And I just moved here.
Guest:I was living with Dave Rath and I was working at MTV.
Guest:I remember that house.
Guest:And I see Odenkirk and Odenkirk sees me.
Guest:And I should have been like, hey, man, how are you doing?
Guest:He's like, he comes up to me.
Guest:He goes, you're Brian Posehn, right?
Guest:And I go, yeah.
Guest:And I'm just kind of a dick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he walked away from that going across like, hey, is there something wrong with that guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Cross was like, he's funny enough.
Guest:And then I think Bob was like, eh, maybe we're kind of the same guy because we can't really talk to people or want to.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Is that how it happened?
Guest:Pretty much.
Guest:And then they said, hey, do you want to write some sketches for this thing?
Guest:Yeah, it was great.
Guest:And they had already put me in sketches by that point.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I fit like a type.
Guest:They had like a grunge thing they wanted.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I already had this up pop thing and they had to put a hat on me and there we go.
Marc:But I mean, part of the book is sort of like, you know, hanging on to the parts of that that you still love and define you.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And yet still, you know, you don't have a choice.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Even if you wanted to shift, there are just some things there's no way that you could let go, right?
Guest:My therapist seems to think that I could let go of that.
Marc:But then you have to, as a grown person, you make these decisions where you're like, why are we trying to get rid of that?
Guest:No, no, that was a, you know, and I've made money off being the nerd or being the picked on guy.
Guest:So, you know, but there was a point 10 years ago in therapy where my therapist was like, you should let go of that.
Guest:You're not that guy anymore.
Guest:And I'm like, I'm kind of making money doing it.
Marc:But do you think you are not that guy anymore?
Marc:I guess you're not being picked on.
Guest:No, I'm not because I'm also, you know, I'm a little kid's favorite person in the world.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:So there are things where this nine-year-old thinks I'm the coolest guy ever and the funniest guy ever.
Guest:And so there is confidence that comes with that.
Guest:And also having fans and knowing that, you know, I did connect with some people.
Guest:But how does that evolve though?
Guest:It makes you feel a little better about, you know.
Marc:Well, you're a functioning adult, and you know what your limitations and what your talents are.
Marc:But in writing the book, do you find that, okay, so you don't have to overplay it anymore, but you're still sitting around listening to metal, and I'm sure you're, I don't know what your game intake is or what you're telling your kids good and bad, but I imagine a lot of that stuff is the same stuff.
Marc:Oh, what I'm turning him onto?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I mean, just sort of like, you know, and in terms of, you know, how you guys interact.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but I don't have anything to go off of with the dad thing.
Guest:So I just tried to be cool and just tried to be there for him and also, you know, be his friend.
Guest:And when I get to the phase, you know, we're not at the phase yet where I'm going to have to be more stern.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, because he's a good little guy now.
Marc:He's nine?
Yeah.
Guest:yeah yeah and i keep waiting for you know the turn yeah the turn like i like sublime dad you're a dick because that's gonna be the one like trump and sublime would be the way to really i think that like you got a good chance it might not happen like is anyone gonna give a fuck about sublime by the time he's 14 right
Marc:It'll be somebody else.
Marc:But that's the way to rebel.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So what was the big takeaway from the book?
Marc:Like, you know, when you were done writing it outside of like, that's a fucking relief.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:Did anything did anything sort of like come together for you?
Guest:Well, I think there's a couple of things in there that, because you had asked me on the porch about, you know, when we were talking about if the book's going to be out before the end of the world and, you know, it reaching some nerd.
Guest:I think some of the things that I say about bullying and my situation with that and then also kind of embracing the nerdiness might ring true for some people.
Guest:Well, yeah, I think it does have a big impact.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:You know, like, and that's like, ultimately, like, that was the sort of.
Guest:That's what I hope.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean.
Guest:But I also wanted it to be funny and have dumb things that people can, you know, picture coming out of my voice.
Guest:And I'm going to do, you know, an audio book, too.
Guest:Oh, yeah, it's great.
Guest:But I felt like as I was writing it, I was like, oh, this definitely feels like it's in my voice.
Guest:And I kept getting that back from the editor.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:That was the main thing was like.
Marc:have it be readable have it be funny yeah have it be in my voice and then and honest yeah yeah and i think that's great because like that that's the weird thing with the way this stuff works even like the podcast and stuff is that you know there's a lot of people out there that are isolated that don't talk to people much that don't like that have similar issues that we do and when they just like if they can just hear someone else talking about it it's like it's it it makes so much difference to know you're not fucking alone in the world
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:I never really understood it, you know, because part of me just kind of likes being alone in the world, you know?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, and there was a point where people would go, hey, if you can get a pretty girl, then I can.
Guest:And I was like, well, fuck you.
Guest:And then I'm like, oh, wait.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Yeah, you're right.
Guest:That is cool that I proved to you that you can get a pretty girl.
Guest:But also fuck you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I wish you the best of luck with it, man.
Marc:Thanks, buddy.
Marc:Thanks for having me.
Marc:Hey, it's great seeing you.
Marc:It's always great seeing you.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:He's the real deal, folks.
Marc:Brian Posehn, the memoir Forever Nerdy, My Dorky Dreams, and Staying Metal comes out next week, October 23rd.
Marc:It'll be funny.
Marc:And those of you who relate to that stuff...
Marc:It's about you.
Marc:You can preorder it right now.
Marc:Oh, I remember what I wanted to tell you about.
Marc:I had a humbling experience.
Marc:But last night I decided to go to a party I was invited to.
Marc:I didn't really know why I was invited.
Marc:It was a charity event, kind of.
Marc:It was at a home.
Marc:It was an Evite from Kathleen Hanna.
Marc:and adam horovitz that you know kathleen hannah from uh bikini kill and uh adam from the beastie boys i i have not i've never met uh either of them um but i figured well they must uh they must want to meet me they must want to have me over they must uh that's exciting because i'd like to talk to both of them and it would be fun to meet them and uh
Marc:And I'm glad that my reputation precedes me.
Marc:And so it was an event at their home for an organization called Peace Sisters.
Marc:PeaceSisters.org.
Marc:It's about raising money to pay for the education of girls in Togo, in Africa.
Marc:But, you know, so I made a donation through the Evite.
Marc:And, you know, I was pretty sure I'd see people I knew there.
Marc:But I was thrilled that...
Marc:That they knew who I was and that they're having me their house.
Marc:So, you know, we get there and we walk in and, you know, Kathleen comes to the door and I say, hi, Mark Maron.
Marc:And didn't seem to register that much.
Marc:And I said, you know, I just talked to Joan Jett.
Marc:She had nice things to say about you.
Marc:And she's like, oh, yeah, you talk to Joan.
Marc:I'm like, yeah, I did on my podcast.
Marc:She's like, oh, you have a podcast.
Marc:I'm like, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I do.
Marc:She goes, yeah, I'm just starting to get into podcasts.
Marc:And part of the event was that she's making T-shirts of people having artists do T-shirts to sell with all the proceeds going to the charities.
Marc:So there's a small T-shirt shop in the...
Marc:In the house there, and she was wearing a Hari Kondabolu shirt, which is an esoteric shirt.
Marc:But many of you may know Hari.
Marc:He's a comic.
Marc:And I saw a W. Kamau Bell shirt.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, I know Hari.
Marc:And, yeah, I see Kamau.
Marc:I know them.
Marc:Yeah, they're comics.
Marc:I'm a comic.
Marc:She's like, oh, you do comedy, too?
Marc:And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I do.
Marc:I do comedy.
Marc:I have a podcast.
Yeah.
Marc:And then I realized that she didn't know me at all.
Marc:No idea who I was or what I did.
Marc:And that, you know, I mean, after a certain point in this game, you know, you think you reach a certain level, certainly with a certain type of person that, you know, you'd be known.
Marc:Nope.
Marc:And Adam Horowitz, the same thing, did not...
Marc:Did not really seem to know who I was.
Marc:So I'm like, why am I at their house?
Marc:How did this happen?
Marc:But I saw Fred Armisen there and Carrie Brownstein and Jackie Tone was there.
Marc:And I saw some of the guys from SNL, Paul Russ.
Marc:I saw a lot of people I knew.
Marc:and Sarah, the painter, saw a lot of painters that she knew there.
Marc:It was a nice event, and I learned about this cause, and it was very moving.
Marc:The woman who started it was there, and Kathleen is involved in it.
Marc:But there was sort of that, you know, all the way through, that kind of weird kind of like nag of like, why was I invited?
Marc:These people don't even know me.
Marc:And then I ran into the publicist who handles They Might Be Giants, and apparently she recommended that I come.
Marc:And I'm glad that I had that moment because I wouldn't have known why.
Marc:And I do admit that I was a little humbled by the whole thing.
Marc:Is that wrong?
Marc:I mean, if you were invited to a party and you weren't sure, you never met the people that were having the party, but you were invited and then you got there and they didn't know you, wouldn't you be like, oh, that kind of stings a little?
Marc:Well, it did.
Marc:All right?
Marc:But it was nice to meet everybody, and hopefully I get to talk to the Beastie Boys and maybe Kathleen at some point.
Marc:But right now, let's talk about Richard E. Grant.
Marc:Now, you know this guy.
Marc:If it's not ringing a bell, you know him.
Marc:If you haven't seen the sort of the classics...
Marc:The Whitnale and I or how to get ahead in advertising.
Marc:I mean, he's been in, you know, he's been in a lot of stuff.
Marc:L.A.
Marc:Story, The Player, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Age of Innocence.
Marc:He was in, oh, Gosford Park.
Marc:That was a big movie.
Marc:He was great in that.
Marc:He's just one of those guys you see around and you're like, oh, that guy.
Marc:It's that guy.
Marc:But apparently he was in Logan, too, which I didn't see.
Marc:And he's in the upcoming Star Wars, from what I understand.
Marc:That's what he told me.
Marc:But anyways, his new film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Marc:with Melissa McCarthy.
Marc:It opens in select theaters tomorrow, October 19th.
Marc:And it's good.
Marc:It's good.
Marc:This is me talking to Richard E. Grant.
Marc:Old houses are nice.
Marc:Do you have an old house?
Marc:1870.
Marc:See, that's the thing.
Marc:Where are you in London?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, London's got a lot more older stuff.
Marc:Yeah, it does.
Marc:We're very excited here when something's lasted 100 years.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:There you can live in a place that's 400, 500, 600 years old.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:We can't even make it through 200 years in this country.
Marc:Why?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's going downhill, Richard.
Guest:How are things in England?
Guest:Oh, they're exactly the same.
Guest:You know, it's a shit show wherever you go.
Guest:And I was reading Roman diaries from ancient Rome.
Marc:Oh, good.
Guest:And, you know, plotters and all those guys, they were just saying, it's, you know, it's the end of the world.
Guest:It's all, everything's gone down the pan.
Guest:So I think it's just, you know, it's the nature of stuff.
Guest:You know, I speak to people who lived through the Second World War and they say, you know, compared to what they went through.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This is, we're living in jam and honey.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's right.
Marc:When I've talked to a few people that I've talked to from from the UK, you know, the older guys.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, McKellen and Patrick Stewart and people, they're like, I remember bombs.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, they were, you know, we were in tunnels.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And the fact that we don't have them now, you think, well, that's an improvement.
Guest:I guess so.
Marc:It's the very proficient and focused psychological warfare that's damning right now.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you just turn on any device and you're going to just shatter your brain's ability to function properly.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Do you stay away from them?
Guest:I plunge into every single possible thing that I can.
Guest:Information overload.
Guest:Are you?
Guest:All the time?
Guest:I don't know whether you do this, but if you Wikipedia somebody or you Google them beforehand, and then, of course, you think you know everything, and then, of course, you meet the person face-to-face, and all that stuff just goes out the window, and you go, oh, there's a human being that I'm talking to, and you look them in the eye.
Guest:But you go on the subway or the tube or whatever the train system it is,
Guest:And the silhouette of our age seems to be everybody is, their head is, even when they're crossing, pedestrian crossing.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Collude to the, you know.
Marc:Yeah, they're getting hit by a car.
Marc:The cell phone.
Marc:That's my biggest fear of walking down the sidewalk or crossing a street as some asshole is going to be looking at his phone like I do.
Guest:But we sound like these grumpy old guys, you know, Waldorf and Statlin.
Guest:I know.
Marc:Right, right, right, right, right.
Marc:Right, but we're also old guys that have adapted.
Marc:My dad, I don't think, has ever listened to one of my podcasts because he claims he can't make the jump to push an arrow on his screen.
Marc:And how does that make you feel?
Marc:Well, that's a long story.
Marc:I've covered it fairly thoroughly.
Marc:You're very angry.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:It is what it is.
Marc:He is what he is.
Marc:And whatever damage he did, I've transcended some of it.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you?
Yeah.
Guest:Yes, but you know what you've done is remarkable that you're here in your garage.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And you've done it.
Marc:So you've brought the world to you.
Marc:I have.
Marc:It was sort of a bit of cosmic timing that finally worked out and just having some sort of talent for it that I didn't know.
Marc:It was all born out of desperation, Richard.
Guest:As everything is, isn't it?
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:But the Google thing or the Wikipedia thing you say is true because I do that often.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I always do find that there's a person over there.
Marc:Like I see you as a person.
Marc:My assumptions about you after doing a bit of research, I don't like to do too much.
Marc:But a lot of times, two things.
Marc:Wikipedia can be way wrong.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like there's just made up people in it.
Marc:There's made up pasts.
Marc:And I learned early on that to make, you know, like I start, if I start leading a guest into sort of like, so your dad was the army.
Marc:And they're like, no.
Marc:He was a play dancer.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Marc:But the human thing is, because I assumed, like, having watched your work for years, that, you know, that you would come, like, tumbling in here like Richard Burton, you know, up all night with a cigarette just reeking of alcohol.
Guest:I'll go out so that I can fulfill this fantasy of yours.
Marc:But I don't know why I would think that.
Marc:But, you know, I mean, some of the characters are a little gnarly.
Marc:But you're clean.
Marc:You're showered.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:allergic to alcohol all of that helps that must have been a rough thing to find out were you told that or was it an experience oh no i couldn't keep anything down when i was 16 i went to the doctor and said you know i'm socially embarrassed because i you know i can't you know i can't hold alcohol and in a macho culture that i grew up in in this um tiny country this smallest country in the southern hemisphere swaziland um that was you know
Guest:You needed a drink.
Guest:You needed a drink.
Guest:And he did a blood test, and he said to me, you know, do you have Asian blood?
Guest:And I said, not that I know of.
Guest:Why are you asking that?
Guest:He said, because you have no enzyme to process alcohol whatsoever.
Guest:You can never, ever drink.
Guest:It's completely toxic to you.
Marc:So you lucked out.
Marc:You avoided the alcoholism trap.
Guest:He said, order a ginger ale, and people will leave you alone.
Guest:And I've done that ever since.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No smoking either?
Marc:No.
Marc:Really?
Marc:I tried one in 1970.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:You're like completely...
Marc:Not the guy that I've seen in movies.
Marc:Yeah, but I like dope.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:So you can smoke dope.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's nice.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Swaziland, like I had to research that.
Marc:I had to, because I was sort of like, what am I going to talk to him about?
Marc:It's like the size of Glendale.
Marc:Is it really?
Marc:It's that small?
Marc:Yeah, it's tiny.
Guest:What years were you there?
Guest:You were born there?
Guest:I was born there because my father was the minister of education while he was still an English protectorate under the last gossip of the British Empire.
Guest:And then they regained their independence in 1968.
Guest:And we carried on living there.
Guest:And I went to school there because of my father's job.
Marc:So he still had the job even after the, how does that work?
Marc:So he worked for, is there an empire?
Marc:He worked for the empire and then the empire was pulling back?
Guest:Yeah, he worked for the British government.
Guest:And then after independence, he was kept on as an honorary advisor because he was fluent in Saswati.
Guest:So he stayed on and then he died there at the age of 51.
Marc:So they kept in there sort of like just, you know, we're not in power, but keep an eye on things.
Marc:He's a token white guy.
Marc:Let us know what they're up to.
Guest:Firmative action.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And so what was the culture like?
Marc:So how did that define you?
Marc:Do you have siblings?
Guest:I do, but I haven't seen my father's funeral 100 years ago.
Guest:You haven't seen your siblings since your father's funeral?
Guest:What it essentially was was a hermetically sealed, more English than English colonial bubble.
Marc:So you didn't go beyond the fence?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:And it was characterized by the three Bs, booze, boredom, and bonking.
Marc:Yeah, bonking.
Marc:I think that word's no longer in operation.
Guest:It's gone.
Marc:It defines how old I am.
Marc:Did that evolve into shagging?
Marc:Yes, shagging, bonking, stooping, whatever you call it.
Marc:Go Yiddish.
Marc:Meeting.
Marc:Yeah, I think some of the youngsters call it just hanging out now.
Marc:Hanging out.
Marc:Yeah, do you want to hang out?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, all right, so you didn't experience the tension of apartheid?
Marc:Was your father, you know, do you come from Dutch people?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I come from very liberal, white, Caucasian, highly educated people.
Guest:And Swaziland was essentially it was nicknamed the Switzerland of Africa because it was mountainous.
Guest:And it was between Marxist Mozambique on the one side.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And fascist apartheid South Africa on the other.
Guest:So they tread this neutral line.
Guest:So all the South African political dissidents sent from the ANC sent their kids to school in Swaziland.
Guest:So I went to school and did school plays with Nelson Mandela's daughters and stuff.
Guest:So.
Guest:That gives you an idea that I had a very liberal, you know, essentially white middle class education.
Guest:Well, that's a gift, I think.
Guest:I think so, yeah.
Guest:It sets you up for tolerance in the world and hope and idealism.
Marc:Oh, those two, the last two are trouble, but...
Marc:They've been beaten out of me by real life.
Marc:Tolerance is something that I think that is actually one of the interesting things about the possible crumbling of liberal democracy is that was the hinge that a lot of people just couldn't handle.
Marc:That it's necessary for democracy to work that you have to have tolerance.
Marc:And it's not necessarily you're not born with it.
Marc:You have to engage it.
Marc:You have to learn it.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Like your manners.
Marc:Right, and now that all these shameless tyrants and weirdos are taking over, people are like, you mean we don't have to put up with this shit anymore?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And they couldn't be happier.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:It's a fucking nightmare.
Marc:But let's get back to you.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So you're in Switzerland of Africa.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What about you?
Marc:Where were you?
Marc:When I was younger?
Marc:When it all went down?
Marc:Well, when Kennedy was shot, I was two months old.
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico, born in New Jersey.
Marc:Most of the formative years, second grade through high school in New Mexico.
Guest:So you, Frank Sinatra, Meryl Streep, and Bruce Willis?
Marc:About what, Jersey?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, but I, well, there's more.
Marc:Springsteen.
Marc:I mean, the list goes on.
Marc:Jersey produced a lot of people.
Marc:I do feel genetically attached, but I am not.
Marc:I was more New Mexico.
Marc:And then I was in Boston, L.A., New York.
Marc:I got around chasing the comedy.
Guest:So where do you feel that you belong?
Guest:Where's your identity?
Marc:Where my brain goes when it seeks comfort?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Probably New Mexico, I would think.
Marc:Albuquerque.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Northern New Mexico in general, the feel of the air.
Marc:It's weird that the sky's there.
Marc:There's something about... The thing that draws me back there is not my high school buddies or that my parents were so terrific.
Guest:The geography.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How about you?
Guest:The smell of it.
Guest:Yeah, it's the exact same thing.
Guest:With Swaziland?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But do you find that Breaking Bad has given Albuquerque a bad or a good reputation?
Guest:Was that your experience of it?
Marc:Well, anything that can bring money into that city, I think, is good.
Marc:And if people want to take little tours to the doghouse where the hot dogs were and here and there, I think it seems fine.
Marc:I think that...
Marc:The studios that were built out there, and I guess the tax incentives that people get for shooting, helps the economy.
Marc:I mean, I don't know that Breaking Bad was... It's a fictitious story, but I do think that the economy of New Mexico has its problems, and they do have, I believe, a methamphetamine issue.
Guest:Right.
Guest:What you're talking about is that landscape has this real homing pigeon instinct in you.
Guest:I think, yeah.
Guest:It goes beyond your friends, your parents, whatever.
Guest:You're drawn back to that.
Marc:Well, it is something like if the landscape because I remember New Jersey, too.
Marc:But what I remember about it is sort of humidity, green tomatoes like my grandmother's house.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, you know, if you're forming and you're in high school and there's some sort of, you know, whatever struggles you're going through as a conscious person, you know, if you find some, you know, if you find some sort of reprieve in the environment in New Mexico is very beautiful, you know, kind of it sits in the back of your head as like I constantly think about moving back there.
Guest:And has this increased as you've got into your later second half of your 50s?
Marc:I just hit the middle 50s.
Marc:I just hit 55.
Marc:It's increased since I've had the freedom to make choices about my life.
Marc:You know, before I earned a living, which was, you know, up to 45 years old, there was a bit of panic.
Marc:But now I'm sort of like, wouldn't it be nice to just stop?
Guest:Now you're living in a mansion in Glendale.
Marc:You're living the dream.
Marc:Yeah, I guess so.
Marc:I'm just like, I don't have a wife.
Marc:I don't have kids.
Marc:I don't have much debt.
Marc:So I'm like, what am I saving money for?
Guest:Why have you had so many wives?
Marc:Two wives?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You did do your homework.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I just had two.
Guest:Is that so many?
Guest:Well, that's quite a lot because they weren't long-lived ones.
Guest:I mean, they weren't long ones.
Marc:No.
Marc:Long wages.
Marc:The first one, I think, was something I did out of an attempt at normalizing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you feel abnormal.
Marc:Well, I just feel like when you live the life of an entertainer, an actor I would assume as well, where your security is dubious.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And also I was a drinker and a little out of control, and I met a woman who...
Marc:was familiar to me in the social structure, and I thought like, well, that'll shape me up.
Marc:Didn't.
Marc:And then I fell in love with some other woman, and I got sober, and I was a crazy person sober, and I eventually drained her of her life force, and she went away.
Guest:And who is currently re-energizing your life force?
Marc:Well, I think I found a fairly non-dramatic, sort of stable, grounded woman who's a painter, abstract painter.
Guest:So does that mean that you were addicted to people that created drama around you before that?
Marc:Well, I don't know.
Marc:Like, I think that if you do the research, that, yeah, you're going to, you know, whether you don't know so immediately, you're going to, the people you're most connected with are going to be what you come from.
Marc:Have you found that?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, but you didn't come from drama.
Marc:You didn't come from insanity?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Hi, drama.
Guest:You know, alcoholic father, drank himself to death, basically, unrequited love for my mother.
Guest:And he tried to shoot me when I was 15 because I emptied a crate of his scotch down the sink.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And, you know, all that stuff.
Guest:But they were divorced?
Guest:They were divorced.
Guest:And I didn't realize that he was still in love with her.
Guest:He told me on his deathbed that he'd never stopped loving her.
Guest:And so in that moment, I understood the tragedy of his life.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:Yeah, it's weird, the finite nature of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, it's not that long of a run, and if you don't make some minor fixes, you're going to... Like, what about your mom?
Guest:Oh, she's 87 and firing on all cylinders.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she's a chipper?
Yeah.
Guest:she's very chipper yeah because her second husband's not so chipper but she is on you know she has great longevity in her genes and she reads you know eight books a week and she's she's on fire with stuff so i'm very impressed by her and i've had a rapprochement with her which has been good for my mental health yeah all these things are important so you were holding on to some darkness and
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know if it was breakdown.
Guest:I was 42.
Guest:How old are you now?
Guest:I am 62.
Marc:So let's go back for a second.
Marc:So you're a kid in Swaziland.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You've got a sibling that you don't talk about or talk to.
Marc:Don't know what happened there.
Guest:Well, I think he has issues and problems.
Guest:Sibling rivalry.
Guest:He perceives me as the favorite child, and that's the narrative that he has in his head that I can't dislodge.
Guest:And it's an aggressive narrative.
Guest:Yes, it has been, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So these are just boundaries that you're just boundaries.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You finally have to draw.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:For your own safety.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:And it's it's a painful thing when you have to do it with family.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they believe they have extraterrestrial rights over you.
Guest:And, you know, they don't know.
Guest:Is he older?
Guest:Two and a half years younger.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:Yeah, it's the same thing.
Marc:They hang on to it.
Marc:It's like your sad father with the unrequited love.
Marc:If you lock into something and it feels deep enough, no shaking it.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:So your parents, how old were you when they got divorced?
Guest:I was 11.
Guest:And I woke up on the backseat of a car and inadvertently saw my mother shagging my father's best friend on the front seat.
Guest:So that sort of got me started diary writing.
Guest:Because I couldn't tell anybody.
Guest:You knew that it was bad.
Guest:I knew that I was seeing something that I shouldn't see.
Guest:And she just thought you were sleeping and she was going to get away with that?
Guest:She thought I was sleeping, yeah.
Guest:She didn't have too many choices about where she could do it.
Marc:I know, but maybe it says something to her British nature that it would be quiet enough.
Marc:Probably.
Guest:Stifle it, you know, stifle the noises.
Guest:Add to the excitement.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, we've discussed this and it's all been out in the open now and it's, you know.
Guest:At 42.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, at 44, I finally confronted her about it in a peaceful way, you know, as a result of help from a psychoanalyst.
Guest:And, you know, she said the three magic words, which I'm sure you will know the power of these, when she said, please forgive me.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And that was, you know, the power shift was instantaneous.
Guest:And my mental health improved incrementally by the nanosecond, which is why I'm this happy, well-adjusted person, you know.
Marc:Because you felt it.
Marc:You're like, you know, it wasn't, it was real.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because she had probably been carrying it somewhere as well.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Can you imagine carrying that?
Marc:No.
Marc:You have all that stuff to convert.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's insane what we carry for a lifetime.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:This seems to be the theme.
Guest:Are you positive by nature or are you- What are you kidding?
No.
Guest:You're a curmudgeon.
Marc:Like Lee Israel.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, no, I'm not that much of a curmudgeon.
Marc:We're sitting in a dark cave in Glendale, covering cobwebs and misery.
Marc:I'm not as much of a curmudgeon as Lee Israel in the film or in person.
Marc:And I watched it.
Marc:I enjoyed it a lot.
Marc:And we're going to talk about it.
Marc:But I'm not through with my vetting.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:So there's diary business.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because, you know, I know you hang on to that, but you still do it?
Guest:I still do it because...
Guest:I think because of the country that I grew up in, the circumstances, there was no television.
Guest:And the huge thrill of my childhood was Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.
Guest:On the moon.
Guest:They're making a movie about that, I think.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It's called First Man.
Guest:And I saw that.
Guest:I heard that on the wireless.
Guest:It was then called in 1969 when I was 12 years old when you were still in diapers.
Marc:Well, I was six.
Marc:Okay, maybe I was in diapers.
Marc:I had problems.
Guest:No, I'm kidding.
Marc:Go ahead.
Marc:Yeah, I had problems.
Guest:And so it seemed as unlikely to say that you wanted to be an actor as it was to say, well, I'm going to be an astronaut.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So to have ended up traveling the world as I have done, meeting the people that I have done, sitting here opposite you.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:This is a big one.
Guest:It's a way of making it feel real.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The diarrhea.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that's a good thing because I've never been able to stick with it.
Marc:But at 11, it was more... Yeah, but you record everything.
Marc:So you've got... I record a lot, but the stuff that goes on behind the face is really...
Marc:The important stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What comes out of the face, you know.
Guest:So you're the smiling clown.
Guest:You're Ippaliachi because you're smiling at me now, but you're actually weeping in misery.
Marc:Not misery, but I could weep pretty easily.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Could you?
Guest:That comes with age.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Since having a child, I don't even watch the news.
Guest:It makes me weep.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I mean that genuinely.
Yeah.
Marc:No, no, the sensitivity thing is kind of profound, but it happens in weird ways.
Marc:I don't get it from the news, but I can get it from moments on the street that seem painfully human.
Marc:You know, again, tolerance and the other that you have to learn, and another thing you have to learn is empathy.
Marc:I don't think we're naturally prone to that.
Marc:We're selfish monsters.
Guest:Act of selflessness or kindness or tenderness and completely undo me because they're not the norm in my experience of life.
Marc:Yeah, and how old were you when you had the child?
Guest:Oh, I was, she is 29.
Guest:I can't do the math.
Guest:I was 31.
Marc:Oh, that's all right.
Marc:I mean, so you've had this crying problem for, you know, 25 years?
Marc:Oh, yeah, 29 years.
Guest:Since the day she was born, 1989.
Guest:Yeah, since then.
Marc:So this thing, but it seems like the diary was more of a confessional thing.
Marc:Like, you know, you needed to sort of account for the darkness you were carrying.
Guest:Yeah, I tried religion.
Guest:I don't know whether you tried that, but, you know, I got no answer.
Marc:How old were you when you tried religion?
Marc:When I was 11.
Marc:Oh, and that was it?
Marc:You made one attempt at 11?
Marc:Well, I tried for about six months.
Guest:What did you try?
Guest:I tried the Bible and praying and all that.
Marc:You didn't come from a church family?
Guest:No.
Guest:And I got no answer.
Guest:My father said that heaven and hell is what you make of your own life.
Guest:It's the here and now.
Guest:Be reassured that there is nothing beyond that when you die, you go back to the unbeing of before you're born.
Marc:Unbeing.
Guest:I kind of like that.
Guest:And I found that very reassuring.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:To have that.
Marc:And now, you know, in retrospect, that your father lived in a hell until his deathbed.
Marc:He chose hell.
Marc:Living hell.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So keeping a diary was a way of, you know, I couldn't tell my friends.
Guest:I certainly could tell my parents.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was a way of making it that I didn't go nuts, that I thought...
Guest:This has happened.
Guest:It's a recording of what's going on.
Marc:It's fucking genius because as you get older, I can't... If you do a diary in the immediacy of it, if you do it every day, I would imagine that you can at least document the moment in your mind and in reality because as I get older, I don't know what's happened and what hasn't and what really happened.
Marc:I've lived in enough cities now and I'm 55.
Marc:People walk up to me and they're like, hey, man, you remember?
Marc:I'm like, you're going to have to...
Marc:Yeah, you're going to have to give me a city, a time period, because I'm not clicking right now.
Marc:So how do you get out of Swaziland?
Marc:How do you end up an actor?
Marc:Because I always make assumptions about the British actors, like that you're all hanging around the same lofty, kind of classically trained Shakespearean model.
Guest:Well, that's not true in my case.
Guest:My father said, your brain is too good to waste on trying to be an actor.
Guest:There's no precedent in our family for doing that.
Guest:So if you can find a university where you can do theater training at the same time, do that.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So he wanted you to be what?
Guest:He wanted me to be a lawyer or a writer or a journalist or something with a noble profession.
Guest:And he genuinely thought that being an actor was a lifetime of wearing makeup tights and avoiding buggery.
Marc:It's interesting.
Marc:Those were his concerns, not that you would possibly not make a living or that it was a scary thing for you.
Guest:He also thought that I would be destitute.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Guest:And I said, well, I didn't care about money.
Guest:And he said, well, you can only say that because you're young, because you will need money.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And this is in Swaziland.
Guest:This is in Swaziland.
Guest:So I found there was a local architect who told me that there was a drama training thing in Cape Town, which was 1,200 miles south of where I grew up.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And you could go and do a university degree there and then make an exception according to your academia.
Guest:of doing the theater diploma at the same time over four years.
Guest:So that's what I did.
Guest:In Cape Town?
Guest:In Cape Town.
Guest:I co-founded the theater company, and then I left there after two years and emigrated to England.
Marc:Well, what was the theater company?
Guest:It was called the Troop Theater Company, and it was multiracial.
Guest:It was based at a theater called The Space in Cape Town.
Marc:The space in Cape Town, what year is this?
Marc:What are we talking like?
Guest:This is 19, I graduated in 1979 and I worked in a theater company 1980, 1981 and then emigrated.
Marc:Okay, so like the world was very connected at that point.
Marc:You weren't living in, you know, people got information not as quickly as we do now.
Marc:So I'm just trying to figure out the tone.
Marc:Was it like experimental theater?
Marc:Were they confronting political?
Guest:Everything was anti-apartheid.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When did apartheid get lifted?
Marc:It was in the 80s?
Guest:1992, Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
Marc:So it was provocative, dangerous theater you were doing.
Guest:That's what we were doing.
Guest:But unfortunately, as you will know all too well, that if you are doing theater for a liberal, middle-class audience, you're preaching to the converted.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that is the audience.
Marc:The theater has a hard time bringing in the youngsters.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It costs too much.
Marc:Well, I don't know what it is, but, you know, when you read about it, and I'm sure you have, too, when you read about, you know, the whether it's, you know, the theater of cruelty or whatever was going on with Julian Beck or you read about even the group theater with these noble people.
Marc:sort of ideas of uh you know bringing poetry and populism to the masses there was still the old people that were shuffling in and filling up half the house to see the new odette's play i don't think it it ever i think it's romanticized i don't think it ever had the traction i don't maybe i'm wrong though in some theater i think you're absolutely right but you feel like you're doing something you do you feel like you're changing the world
Marc:Yeah, and so do you feel personally that you had some effect on the decision to release Mandela from prison in the 90s?
Guest:No, because I realized that after doing it for, you know, and doing every political writer that we could lay our hands on and having actors within the group write plays, we made not an ounce of difference.
Guest:It counted on the most right-wing...
Guest:extreme afrikaner apartheid people meeting the most extreme left-wing african national congress people and they were the people that's you know that's where it happened sure but nothing to do with the liberal minority right but like i guess on some level though like and i think this is probably more important you know in terms of looking at historically you did
Marc:You know, meet different people.
Marc:You did engage in different points of view.
Marc:You did work with, you know, like I think that that sort of micro level of integrating and embracing and doing that kind of stuff doesn't mean nothing.
Guest:Good.
Guest:Well, I'm glad to hear that.
Guest:My education was an entire waste of time.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, I have to believe that, right?
Marc:You have to believe on some level that, you know, if you do good things and, you know, you take chances that, you know, you don't know the butterfly effect.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:So, were you doing like, you know, all the regular kind of experimental weirdness, naked plays and, you know, yelling plays?
Marc:We did that.
Guest:We did all of those things.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're out in the audience making them uncomfortable plays.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you never had any training?
Guest:Theater Without Walls.
Guest:No, we had training.
Guest:Oh, you did?
Guest:Three years of drama training, yeah.
Guest:And what kind of training was that?
Guest:Based on the Stanislavski method, and they used the curriculum of, in a very colonial way, of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London as the template of what to do.
Marc:So you had the Royal Academy template and then one guy who taught method.
Yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:There's a smorgasbord of stuff.
Guest:So theater of cruelty, mime, restoration drama, you know, how to walk and talk.
Guest:And there's also be bold enough to take all your clothes off and keep a conversation going at the same time and improvise.
Guest:Shakespeare.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Lots of Shakespeare.
Marc:I get a little obsessed with Shakespeare when I talk to British people.
Marc:Why?
Marc:Because I don't have the love for it that I should.
Marc:And Ian McKellen, Sir Ian McKellen, sat there across from me in my old garage and did a monologue to my face.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And I was like, okay, I get it.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:Did you understand what he was saying?
Marc:I did.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:Well, that's the tricky thing.
Marc:It's like if you listen, it's still going to be difficult, but you'll get the hang of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But if you check out for a second, you're fucked.
Marc:You're fucked plot-wise.
Guest:You're fucked story.
Guest:You must be talking Mongolian.
Marc:Yeah, I don't like it.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:But do you find that you understand it?
Guest:Because I grew up reading it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was read to me.
Guest:It's something that's familiar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I perfectly understand that my daughter doesn't have that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Same thing.
Guest:I mean, she likes to go into the theater to see it, but I certainly didn't read Shakespeare to her.
Guest:Does she want to go in the show business?
Guest:She is a casting director.
Marc:Well, see, that's a reasonable job in show business.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Have you had to go before her to audition for him?
Guest:She has.
Guest:She got me a job in a movie called The Nutcracker.
Marc:Well, those connections really worked out for you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, she put me up for the job.
Guest:That was your ticket.
Guest:You didn't have to get it.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm counting on that from my old age.
Marc:So you're loaded up with method Shakespeare and a sort of unique racial tolerance and you go back to Britain?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And what?
Marc:And then what happens?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, when I got there in 1982, Mrs. Thatcher was the then prime minister.
Guest:She decided to invade these tiny islands called the Falklands of Argentina.
Guest:You know, to what effect, I have no idea.
Guest:Does anyone know?
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think, you know, her polls were very, very low at that point.
Guest:She was a great Churchillian follower.
Guest:And I think she thought this would be the way that would save her bacon.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:And I did.
Marc:By having a generation of people going, where?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That said, 82, Thatcher.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're going and you want to make a difference in England now, right?
Marc:You're going to jump right into the provocative theater scene.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:25 years old.
Guest:And then you find that all you can get is a job as a waiter in Covent Garden next to the Opera House.
Guest:That's about as radical as you can get.
Guest:So all those, you know, the ideology goes out the door because suddenly you don't have...
Guest:You don't have this big wall of apartheid to fight.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because it's, you know, happening on another continent in a different hemisphere.
Marc:But you do have the fight in England, but for some reason those fights seem less pressing.
Guest:Yeah, they do.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Fights, you know, when people were sort of getting hot under the collar about what Mrs. Thatcher was doing compared to the Labour Party, it seemed in relation to what the atrocities and inhumanity of the apartheid system, it seemed small.
Guest:It seemed political.
Guest:Yeah, it seemed political.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you were a waiter and you were like, what do I have to do to work?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Enough of this ideological.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Just get me a job.
Marc:And what was the first big acting job?
Guest:Oh, I got I did a lunch hour play.
Guest:And then from that, I got an agent and then, you know, started doing drips and draps.
Guest:It's absolutely the classic route.
Guest:All right.
Marc:What's a lunch hour play?
Guest:Oh, a soap opera?
Guest:No, it's in a pub, in a bar.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, at that point, you could do a play for an hour, and people used to take lunch hours, and they don't anymore.
Marc:They'd go to a pub to see some kids?
Guest:They'd go to see some young actors performing, and they'd get some poor agent dragged in there to come stuff their face with a sandwich and see you act and then represent you as an agent.
Guest:So that's how it got started.
Marc:And so then you started doing TV work or what?
Guest:No, I'm doing theater work.
Marc:Oh, it was all theater work.
Guest:Yeah, all theater work.
Guest:And then I got one TV job in 1985, followed by nine months of unemployment.
Guest:And the job was with an improvised thing for the BBC with Gary Oldman, of all people.
Guest:And then when it came out, the day after it came out a year later, I got a new agent and cast in a film called Whithnel and I because Daniel Day-Lewis had turned down the part.
Guest:Really?
Guest:If he hadn't, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now.
Marc:That broke you.
Marc:That's like this, to this day, is a cult favorite of sorts.
Marc:It is in England.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, it is a bit here.
Marc:We have the Anglophile population.
Marc:They're quiet here, but there's a lot of them.
Marc:And I don't know.
Marc:It is a very specific thing.
Marc:American Anglophiles, it will just be like, oh, anything, anything English.
Marc:They're on PBS, sort of mainlining.
Marc:Waiting, waiting for something.
Marc:Waiting for Downton Abbey.
Marc:Yeah, Downton Abbey.
Marc:But it used to be what?
Marc:Upstairs, downstairs.
Marc:And then Monty Python.
Marc:And there's a masterpiece theater.
Marc:Anything English people.
Marc:They loved it.
Marc:They're like, why can't we be as together as those people?
Marc:Proper and whatnot.
Marc:But like was Withnell, so when it came out in England, was it popular?
Guest:No, which came and went very, very quickly.
Guest:And it was only as a result of being on DVD, on video and DVD and students taking it up that it then developed this cult following.
Marc:But I think that guy is interesting because he did a couple of movies with him and the other movie was like amazing.
Marc:Again, a cult favorite.
Marc:But like, I don't know.
Marc:I think everyone should see how to get ahead in advertising.
Marc:That thing is a crazy fucking movie, man.
Guest:Well, it's about a man who grows a talking boil on his neck.
Guest:It's so good.
Guest:When it first starts talking, it's insane.
Guest:An anti-Thatcherite rant from the director, writer Bruce Robinson.
Guest:Do you like that guy?
Guest:What happened to that guy?
Guest:He lives on a farm.
Guest:He's 72 years old on the Welsh border in England.
Guest:He's out of the game.
Guest:I see him very regularly.
Guest:You do?
Guest:We stay great friends.
Guest:I think he's sort of a brilliant guy.
Marc:Yeah, he is.
Marc:Did he do a lot of work after How to Get Ahead in Advertising?
Guest:He originally wrote The Killing Fields, which made his name a nomination.
Marc:That movie, Sam Watterson, Malkovich, that was a great movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Great movie.
Guest:I hadn't thought about that movie in a long time.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he wrote that, and he recently published a book, a huge 1,200-page doorstopper called Jack the Ripper.
Guest:Is it a historical thing, or is it a fictionalization?
Guest:Yeah, no, no, no.
Guest:He believes that he found who the real Jack the Ripper was.
Marc:And was it part of the royal family?
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:No.
Marc:I'm thinking that's a theory, though, wasn't it?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:There are so many theories, and nobody's nailed it.
Marc:And you work with, what were you in Henry and June?
Marc:I don't, I remember.
Guest:I played Anais Nin's husband who had a 12 inch penis.
Guest:Despite which she went off with Henry Miller instead because he was much more interesting, a lesser sized member.
Marc:And that was a shaved head Fred Ward in my recollection?
Guest:Shaved head Fred Ward, yeah, because Alec Baldwin was going to play the part.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he pulled out, I think two weeks before we started shooting.
Guest:And Daniel Day-Lewis pulled out of Withnell.
Guest:He was offered it because he had broken America, essentially, because he played Nefitte Edwardian in Room of the View and Gay Punk in My Beautiful Laundrette.
Marc:Right, My Beautiful Laundrette.
Guest:And they were released on the same day.
Guest:which was an absolute genius from his variety point of view because people couldn't believe it was the same person.
Guest:Do you know that guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was opposite of absolutely everything and chose to do the unbearable likeness of being instead.
Marc:The unbearable length of this movie?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he chose to do that and so they were scraping around and they found a guy who had been in one TV show with Gary Oldman.
Guest:And so that's how I got to play that part.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Are you friends with Daniel?
Guest:I met him on.
Guest:I was on.
Guest:I had a small part in Scorsese's Age of Innocence.
Guest:Oh, yes.
Guest:And on the first day of shooting, I prostrated myself in front of him.
Guest:And I said, oh, Daniel, I owe you my entire career and life.
Guest:And he said, arise, young man.
Guest:In character still.
Guest:He was not in character at that point.
Guest:And then he was in character from the next day and didn't speak to me for the next three months and then spoke to me on the last day that I was shooting and came out of his character.
Guest:So it was an extraordinary experience.
Guest:But what do you think of people who work that way?
Guest:Well, Daniel has three Oscars.
Guest:So you can't really in all conscience argue with the man's method.
Marc:But have you tried to do that?
Guest:Your approach is... No, my approach is doesn't do that.
Guest:And I don't have any Oscars on my shelf because I think that, you know, at the end of the day, you have your own life and you are pretending to be somebody else.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:But, you know, let's not, you know, let's not be the Oscars is somewhat of a political ordeal.
Marc:And, you know, I mean, don't just talk about it like it's some sort of weird justice system.
Marc:And I mean, he's a great actor.
Marc:I'm not going to deny him that, but you'll get an Oscar.
Marc:If you keep working and you live to about 90, they have to give you one.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:It'll happen.
Guest:Well, then I've got to live for another 30 years, baby.
Guest:You can do it.
Marc:I'll keep trying my breathing.
Marc:It's weird.
Marc:You work with these great, you work with Coppola and Scorsese when they decided to do things that were completely different than what they had done before.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:You know, like, you know, you miss the gritty sort of like, you know, hands-on guy in your age of innocence.
Marc:I mean, what was it like?
Marc:That was like a study in table settings.
Guest:Completely.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But what was your... Did you have a... I imagine because of Dracula, you had a bit more to do.
Marc:What was it working with Coppola?
Guest:Was it something?
Guest:He was like a circus ringmaster.
Guest:And he likes to work in a self-confessed state of chaos where family, friends, people, dogs, music, everything is...
Guest:just into the mix of it he told me the best way i understood of of him because we were rehearsing at his um biggest state in the napa valley yeah before we started and i said he said i can't cook for two people i can only cook for 30 people and i thought that was exactly the metaphor for how he worked as a director yeah where scorsese was the exact opposite he worked in monastic silence people whispered on the set and if people whispered a
Guest:a little bit louder than that.
Guest:He would literally blow a gasket.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was very, it was the exact opposite.
Guest:And I worked one from one director to the next without, I think, a two-week break.
Guest:So it couldn't have been more extreme.
Guest:And whether that was because of the subject matter of La Lida, upper class, you know, Edith Wharton's society, turn of the century in New York,
Guest:Or whether that's how he always is, I don't know.
Guest:But Michael Bauhaus, the late Michael Bauhaus, the cinematographer on Dracula and Age of Innocence, said to me that this is how he always works.
Guest:He's got a lot going on in his mind.
Guest:Quiet and intense.
Marc:Well, you know, with Coppola, I think there's like pre-aging and pre-medication Coppola, and it sounds like you got in under the wire.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I feel like I think something shifted in his disposition because if you watch Heart of Darkness, the documentary Hearts of Darkness about making Apocalypse, it was clear that he was just like.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you got to experience that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Altman as well towards the end, I guess.
Marc:Well, that was, I was going to say, the player, you were great in that.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Because I think you have a knack for slightly morally bankrupt characters.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:This is true.
Marc:yeah but but cynicism will out yeah right exactly but i mean there's that moment it was a great turn in that movie and and and and one of the i think few comedic turns in the player was when you know you shift you know you start out like you an artist and then you know you know no stars yeah when you come right that's right no stars yeah and i've got julia robertson bruce willis the complete sellout complete just like boom yeah
Marc:But what about him as a director?
Marc:Because that seemed a little more controlled for him than usual, that movie.
Guest:Well, because that movie was scripted.
Guest:And so what he really added to that was casting everybody who was an extra as a movie actor.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So that was the thing that really was the kick of that.
Marc:Of the player.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's a great movie.
Guest:Do you like it?
Guest:Yeah, I loved it.
Guest:I loved doing it.
Guest:And because I'd seen Nashville 27 times when I was a theater student, so I thought that I'd never live long enough or he would live long enough and I'd never get the chance to work for him.
Guest:And I was told when I left drama school I looked too weird to be...
Guest:an actor who could make it so yeah um i never thought that i'd work with with with him and so i got three three goes with him and he was he was very loyal to actors and he loved them yeah so that was you know you think that would be the norm for movie directors but um i don't think it entirely is and but he certainly he loved people and he was very loyal
Guest:So you did Player, Pret-a-Porter.
Guest:And Gosford Park.
Guest:Oh, Gosford Park.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That was sort of a return to form a little bit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Again, completely scripted with improvised bits around it.
Guest:But essentially, it was Julian Fellow's script that he had to follow.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But they had that vibe, though.
Marc:Like that was one of those.
Marc:Oh, you played the head butler guy, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it had that vibe because the difference between the serving class and the upper class, like the chatter, that was the play in that movie, right?
Marc:The way humans interacted.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah, that was a good Altman movie.
Marc:I'd forgotten that he did that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:A lot of directors just think like, well, we hired you to do what you do, so what do you want from me?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Don't ask.
Guest:Yeah, just go do it.
Guest:Just don't bump into the furniture, just get on with it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's the norm, I would think.
Marc:I think it is, yeah.
Marc:Was that disillusioning for you initially?
Marc:It was a big surprise.
Guest:That's when your theater training comes to the fore, that you know that you've got to know all the stuff in advance and make decisions about it and not...
Guest:Not entirely relied that the director is going to be the person who's going to provide you all the answers.
Guest:Not daddy.
Guest:Not the Wizard of Oz, but I mean, you pull the curtain back and you see somebody who's not thinking about the acting.
Marc:But in Henry and June, you work with Kaufman.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And he was like an underappreciated director, I think.
Guest:I think he was, yeah.
Guest:I think he is.
Guest:Was he engaged?
Guest:He was completely engaged, and he and his late wife Rose had co-written the screenplay, and they were passionate about Henry Miller, and they'd lived all their lives in San Francisco.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:So they had all the sort of liberal arts credentials to take that story on.
Marc:I thought it was a pretty good movie.
Marc:I want to talk a little bit about the movie that you made that I did not see.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Because it was an autobiographical film, right?
Marc:Wawa?
Guest:Yeah, and set in Swaziland where all the stuff that I talked to you right at the beginning about.
Guest:And the movie opens with Miranda Richardson, who played my mother, shagging a guy that was my father's best friend.
Guest:Gabriel Byrne played my father, and Emily Watson played my stepmother.
Guest:So it was Nicholas Holt played me when I was 14 years old.
Guest:So it was a very cathartic thing to do.
Guest:It was painful to write and then an amazingly cathartic and rewarding experience to direct because I was going as a middle aged person in control of 120 people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Recreating your life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was an amazing thing.
Guest:Of course, egocentric in the extreme.
Guest:But to do it in the actual locations where this stuff happened was really bucking the theory that you can't go back in time.
Guest:And it felt like we literally did go back in time.
Marc:And you're proud of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Was it a struggle to do?
Guest:Oh, it took five years.
Guest:And, you know, the money fell through all the time.
Guest:And we never thought it would ever get released.
Guest:But, you know, it got shown at the Toronto Film Festival and won awards and things.
Guest:So, you know, I'm just amazed that we ever got it made.
Guest:Do you direct more now?
Guest:I've tried.
Guest:And the other two projects that I've had have financially collapsed three weeks before shooting started.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:So it kind of put a dent in it for a while.
Guest:So I thought, well, I'll stick to the day job.
Marc:I'm always amazed at people that do that because it really does.
Marc:You want to make a movie on an independent level.
Marc:I mean, it could take five, ten years of your life.
Guest:Yeah, it's masochism.
Guest:I don't have that many years left.
Guest:So I started making perfume instead.
Guest:No, I read that, and I was sort of like, you know, what is that about?
Guest:Well, it's a lifelong obsession.
Guest:I fell mad in love with an American girl called Betsy Clapp who'd arrived in Swazin in 1969.
Guest:I couldn't afford to buy perfume for her, so I made what I thought was going to be, you know, absolute Chanel No.
Guest:5 out of gardenia and rose petals, boiled up in sugar water and buried in the garden.
Guest:And, of course, it was just stink bombs, so it took me another 40 years to professionally make it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I now made it with, you know, lime, marijuana, mandarin.
Guest:You can buy it in L.A.
Guest:and you can buy it online.
Guest:What's it called?
Guest:It's called Jack and it's unisex.
Marc:And this was not some sort of, like, because I was looking at that.
Marc:I'm like, would a company reach out to Richard Grant?
Marc:Like, has he, like, got that much traction in that world?
Marc:No, I don't.
Marc:To make a cent?
Guest:Self-finance and self, you know, the whole thing is.
Guest:This was an obsession.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a one-man brand obsession.
Marc:That's insane.
Marc:It seems like that somewhere in you, you're your father's son.
Marc:You have a little unrequited love for that girl.
Marc:Clearly, yes.
Marc:What happened to Ms.
Marc:Clapp?
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:She left Swazdown a year later.
Guest:I've never seen sight and a sound of her since.
Marc:But boy, burying that bottle, it stuck with you.
Marc:It has certainly done.
Guest:And how's that sense selling?
Guest:It has done really well.
Guest:It has?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, there you go.
Guest:A whole new business.
Guest:A whole new business.
Guest:More reliable than trying to make independent movies.
Marc:That's insane.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:Well, I guess what people have seen you recently is, Jackie, I thought that was a great movie.
Marc:Oh, thank you.
Marc:Great movie.
Guest:Did you enjoy that movie?
Guest:Yeah, because I thought that Natalie Portman did an extraordinary job.
Marc:It's sort of like, it's kind of a meditation on grief.
Marc:Yeah, it is.
Marc:It was really kind of a powerful, interesting movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I didn't see Logan.
Marc:I'm not a superhero guy.
Marc:Was that fun?
Guest:It was very testosterone.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is that a lot for you on a set?
Guest:A crew of 300 people as opposed to, you know, working with Marielle Heller and all her predominantly female crew on how to, you know, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is the complete opposite of that experience.
Marc:Well, I mean, I would assume that Wolverine is the extreme example of Alpha.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:A crew of 300 men, and they've all got muscles the size of my head.
Guest:And you're the bad guy.
Guest:I was a bad guy, one of them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You like that?
Guest:Um, yeah, it's fine to do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, and, and also I have to pay a little attention to like, I'm not a doctor who guy, but I imagine there's a lot of people that, you know, they love you for that.
Marc:You did it twice.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:And I did a, they did a radio version of it at one point.
Guest:Um, so it was never, I think it was animated with voiceover and stuff.
Guest:So I played the doctor in that.
Guest:And then I played the villain in a Christmas special.
Marc:Oh.
Guest:Of Doctor Who.
Marc:Do you find a lot of people know you from that, a certain type of person?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Do you do Comic-Con and stuff?
Guest:I haven't, but I've heard about them.
Guest:I've been invited.
Marc:That's that world, isn't it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you won't go?
Guest:I haven't gone yet.
Marc:I'm sure I will.
Marc:And what is this Star Wars business?
Guest:star wars business is you know you read get sent a generic scene and you self tape and you send it off and you have no idea what it is it goes out of the ether and then two months go by and your agent calls up or my agent called up and said uh they're sending a car for you to go to pinewood studios to meet jj abrams the director for what star wars right okay so you go in there and he says so you're gonna do the part you go what's the part and
Guest:And from then onwards, you sign a confidentiality treatment, and you can not mention anything other than that you're in it.
Marc:So you don't know anything about it publicly?
Guest:Not at all, no.
Guest:Not at all.
Guest:But apparently I've been doing it.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Yeah, and I've been costumed.
Guest:Is that exciting?
Guest:It is, because you go into a parallel universe.
Guest:That's something that I'd seen when I was 18 years old at drama school in 1977, and suddenly you're in that place where...
Guest:spacey things are going on around you and also you're part of the history now I mean it's like it's a it's a rarefied kind of you know what I mean the cynical part of you know the terror part paranoia part of my brain thinks will I be in the movie when it comes out next Christmas or will I be cut out or replaced and that's always a possibility that's the problem of the acting thing exactly but you weren't doing stand-up Star Wars I'd just be you know I'd be riffing here now for the next two hours that's right maybe that's it you can still do it man
Marc:But the new movie, I watched it last night, can you ever forgive me?
Marc:And, you know, I've talked to Melissa before.
Guest:Oh, you have?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And, you know, we all know her as a comedian, you know, and this is a serious role for her.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And it's kind of an abrasively heartbreaking character.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you, I've not seen this much of you in a long time in a movie.
Marc:I mean, this is a big role.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And it was, you know, again, sort of a heartbreaking, abrasive character.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it was great.
Marc:I really enjoyed the film, and I thought, you know, you captured that particular guy with all his flaws, you know, very perfectly.
Guest:Well, thank you.
Guest:But that's entirely due to the screenplay by Nicole Hoff Center and Jeff Whitty and Marielle's direction.
Guest:And how he was working with Melissa.
Marc:And how was that working with Melissa?
Marc:She's very difficult.
Marc:Oh, no.
Guest:Yeah, she's very, very difficult.
Guest:She's unkind.
Guest:She's unfriendly.
Guest:She never knows a line.
Guest:She's always blatant.
Guest:She has terrible breath.
Guest:It was a nightmare, frankly.
Guest:But I hope you don't publish any of that.
Marc:We wouldn't dare put that on the podcast.
Guest:She was absolutely extraordinary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everything that you'd hoped for.
Guest:I know this sounds pretentious, but I mean it very, very sincerely.
Guest:She's incredibly, as you will know, sitting across from her.
Guest:She's emotionally present.
Guest:She's like blotting paper.
Guest:You say something to her and you see the effect.
Guest:There's no subterfuse.
Guest:There's no calculation or whatever.
Guest:You just feel that you're getting the genuine person.
Guest:I think that is why people love her so inordinately.
Marc:And it's interesting to see her do such a difficult and... Cmudgeon.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And angry.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:She's an angry woman.
Marc:Yeah, I just thought the whole thing was played really nicely, that the center, like the story itself being a true story about this desperation that leads to this fairly gifted writer doing these forgeries.
Marc:Your relationship with her as her partner, it kind of haphazard happens out of nowhere because you meet in this sad, lonely kind of daytime gay bar.
Marc:But what I thought was interesting is that...
Marc:The focus, it didn't shift to the sexuality of the thing.
Marc:I mean, it was there, but it was really about the relationship with these two sort of broken, desperate people that were doing what was necessary and also exciting to sort of live.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He happens to be gay.
Guest:She happens to be lesbian.
Guest:And it doesn't seem to be of any real.
Guest:It's not ever made into an issue movie in that way.
Guest:And I thought that was a great strength to it.
Marc:Yeah, it was just is.
Marc:It wasn't avoided, obviously.
Marc:Absolutely not.
Marc:I mean, the scene towards the end, like that moment where she says, watch your house.
Marc:I'm watching the movie going like, no, you can't let that guy.
Marc:What are you thinking is going to happen?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, it was so sad when she comes home.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's so funny.
Marc:I don't want to talk about it because that's actually a spoiler in that movie.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:You watch her apartment and she comes home.
Marc:It's a very sad moment.
Marc:But oddly, you know, that as difficult as she was and, you know, as somewhat contemptible as your character is, you do empathize.
Marc:I mean, you do at the end, you know, want them to be okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that what Marielle Heller really did as a director was...
Guest:she was uncompromising about dealing with the loneliness and desperation of these people.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:You know, it's like just muddling through life.
Guest:And, you know, what John Lennon famously said just before he was murdered, that life is what happens in between your plans.
Guest:And this is exactly what happens to these two people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the sort of the desperation and the loneliness.
Marc:And you're sort of a hustler.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and she is just, you know, desperate and bitter.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was like, I think that, you know, oddly, a lot of people can relate to that.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What's amazing about Melissa is that she just innately mines the inherent comedy of what is in there.
Guest:It is fascinating.
Guest:She gets laughs out of things you think, wow, on paper, is that funny?
Guest:But she makes it because it's very, very true.
Marc:It's her nature.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, she can't, like, yeah, because now at this point in culture, when you see her, you're kind of like, she's going to make a thing.
Marc:But she doesn't really do it that way.
Marc:She does it very much in character.
Marc:And it is a hard character.
Marc:And I thought that the surrounding actors were kind of great as well.
Marc:Like that woman who owned the bookstore.
Guest:Dolly Wells, yeah.
Marc:Wow, man.
Marc:And that was shot really smartly, you know, in the sense that when she's sitting there, you can't really see how tall she is or how old she is or, you know, where she's coming from.
Marc:But then when, you know, they're out, it's like a whole different thing.
Marc:And she played the vulnerability of that character.
Marc:It was like devastating.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the story is a true story.
Marc:Now, if people don't know, it's about a woman who had written successfully a couple of biographies and been on the bestseller list but could not really make her own way writing about herself.
Marc:And she was obsessed with writing about Fanny Bryce.
Marc:And then somehow or another falls into forging letters of famous writers and selling them.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In order to pay her rent.
Marc:In order just to survive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's a kind of act of literary ventriloquism.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And she was successful at it because she could find the voice of these people and make it convincing.
Guest:I mean, she convinced experts that these were letters, unknown letters by Dorothy Parker, Lillian Helm and Noel Coward, you know, great writers in her own right.
Guest:And she managed to clone herself into being who they were.
Guest:her name was lee israel lee israel yeah now and and this all happened to her now when you got the script was it offered to you did you have to audition for it or did you you know when you read the material were you like oh this is great story i got called by an agent who said you have 24 hours to read the script and made it make a decision start shooting in a month's time in in what two months time in manhattan january two years ago and i said
Guest:Who has dropped out or who has died?
Guest:And she said, that is not what you should be asking yourself or are you concerning with.
Guest:Do you want to do this?
Guest:I said, who's playing the Israel?
Guest:I said, Melissa McCarthy.
Guest:And I thought, well, you read that.
Guest:Because I'd seen everything she'd done.
Guest:I knew that it was just a gift of a part and a gift of a role.
Guest:So we jumped at it.
Marc:Those are the questions you shouldn't be asking except it's happened to you twice, three times.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a natural.
Marc:Because I know, it's so fucked up about show business.
Marc:It's sort of like you get offered these things.
Marc:It's like you have 10 minutes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's like, how did it get to that?
Marc:How did it get to that?
Marc:To 10 minutes?
Marc:How am I?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you find out anything to make it bad for you?
Marc:No, I didn't.
Guest:And I try to stick with the thing of not asking who or what or how, who would turn it down or pulled out or whatever, because it's not good.
Guest:If you're given to paranoia, which I am, that's not the way to go.
Marc:But what do you do when that happens?
Marc:I mean, if you found out before you started acting and then you just compare yourself to that person?
Guest:Yeah, I think you do.
Marc:Yeah, but you even do that.
Guest:It's like trying to ask what somebody was like, the person who you're with now, that they were stooping before.
Guest:You may have enormous curiosity to find out about them, but it's best not to know and certainly not see a photograph of them.
Guest:Because you're only going to feel probably inadequate, I think.
Marc:Yeah, I think that diminishes a little bit with age when you get a little bit of confidence.
Marc:It's sort of like, all right, what am I going to do?
Guest:Yeah, but you know about confidence, it just doesn't, unfortunately, it's that sort of like juggling with jelly and water.
Guest:It doesn't hold for long.
Guest:It's the worst.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's the worst.
Guest:You feel so great on one day and then somebody just comes up and side swipes you and you're just, you know, like, you know, flattened all over again.
Marc:Yeah, or when you have to show up to do the work and you feel that heaviness, that heavy hearted thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're like, I'm not...
Marc:I can't do it.
Marc:I'm not good enough.
Marc:Yeah, I can't go out the door.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:You get that still?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That never goes away.
Guest:I just accept that that's how it is.
Marc:But do you find that, like, right when you start doing what you're doing that you're kind of – Yeah, the terror is enormous.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But does it diminish when you engage?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Once you start, because I mean, in this situation, in this movie, I got to New York on a Wednesday and I said, I think there was a plan that we're going to rehearse before we started shooting on the Monday.
Guest:And then I was told, you know, Melissa had been making 75 movies in four concerts or whatever she was doing, writing and publishing three books and launching a fashion line.
Guest:She turned up on the Friday and I begged Mariel Heller.
Guest:I said, can we please just have half an hour, 10 minutes, anything, just so we meet.
Guest:So it was not on the first day having to play these people.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So it turns out that Melissa felt the same way.
Guest:And we spent the whole morning going through the script and having lunch together and talking.
Guest:You know, as you know from the Malcolm Gladwell, you know, blink book essays that you make a decision about another human being, whether you're going to get on with them or not, instinctively within, you know, 15 nanoseconds.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:So, well, you have a very sort of animal instinctive response to somebody.
Guest:And we got on right from the get-go.
Guest:And I think that that was a godsend because...
Guest:It then meant that when we started work on Monday, actual shooting, I felt like I sort of innately knew something about her.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:In a way that if we'd met on the first day, my nerves would have been so shredded with jet lag and not sleeping for 72 hours, trying to get through the weekend.
Guest:I'm not going to be fired.
Guest:You hate my guts or whatever.
Guest:So we'd gone through that.
Guest:And we all found that we had the same idea about what this movie could and should be.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:And I would think that you would have to be a real tremendous asshole for Melissa McCarthy not to like you.
Marc:Believe me.
Guest:Believe me.
Marc:Do not be fooled.
Marc:She seems so embracing, you know?
Marc:She is.
Marc:And it was nice to see Jane Curtin, too, huh?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Gosh, so good to see her.
Marc:And so good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I love when that happens.
Guest:Uncompromising and just straight down the line being an absolute, you know, just a gorgon.
Marc:Yeah, and there was a sort of a nice comedic balance to the thing a little bit subtly.
Marc:And I like when Melissa McCarthy, I guess her husband got cast as the scumbag guy, you know, the guy who's like shady.
Guest:Yeah, one of the autographed booksellers.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But, you know, she essentially got the part by sleeping with him, by being a husband, because he was cast in the former incarnation of the movie.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And when that cast and director went down, he was still attached to it, and Melissa then read it, and she obviously was a fan of Nicole Hoffsenter's writing.
Guest:And so then Melissa got very keen on this project and kept saying, you know, this is a great character and this should get made.
Guest:So she happened to be married to the guy that was cast.
Guest:So he was the common denominator.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:They make their own movies as to.
Marc:They do.
Marc:So Lee Israel is no longer with us?
Marc:No, she died 2014.
Guest:Did she die happier or with more money?
Guest:What do you know?
Guest:There was a guy that was hanging around the Julius Bar, which is the oldest gay bar in Manhattan, where we were shooting, where Lee Israel parked herself regularly with headphones on and a Walkman cassette to shut the world out, but not to be harassed by people.
Guest:And a guy came up to... Melissa went up to this guy who was hanging around a lot and said, you know, I don't know who you are.
Guest:Are you on the crew or whatever?
Guest:He said, no, no, no.
Guest:I was a friend of Lee's.
Guest:And he said, it's very uncanny for me to be seeing you as Lee sitting there because I used to sit next to her.
Guest:And she said to him, do you think Lee would have been happy with what we're doing?
Guest:And his response was, happy was not really anything that Lee did.
Guest:So, you know, I think that...
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:The guy that knew her, who's the producer, David, who encouraged Lee to write this story eventually about her FBI forging life, he thought that she would have been incredibly thrilled to have this spotlight on her work and her life.
Marc:Did Melissa get her?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, you read the book and you go, she's absolutely nailed who this person is.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:Well, I enjoyed the movie.
Marc:It was great talking to you.
Marc:Good luck with the rest of the junket.
Marc:Thank you very much.
Marc:And yeah, I look forward to seeing you in movies always.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That was great.
Marc:I had no idea what to expect.
Marc:He wanted to know a bit about me.
Marc:I gave it to him and then he told me about him and it was an interesting story.
Marc:It was unique and I enjoyed his company.
Marc:He's a very sweet guy and great actor.
Marc:Loved it.
Marc:Hey, have a good weekend.
Marc:Maybe I'll see you at The Thing.
Marc:And if not, you know, have a good time at that thing you're doing.
Marc:Hey, good luck with the thing that you got going.
Marc:Hope that works out.
Marc:Don't worry about it.
Marc:It'll be good.
Marc:It'll be good.
Marc:It'll be good.
Marc:I will play some simple, redundant guitar now.
Guest:Boomer lives!