Richard E. Grant has revealed he cut off his best friend of 29 years after he was accidentally CCed on an email filled with “brutal” comments about him.
The 68-year-old Thursday Murder Club actor said he immediately decided to end the friendship of nearly three decades after receiving the message, which contained “a paragraph of such toxicity.”
During a recent episode of the Mad, Sad, & Bad podcast, Grant described the person as someone who he “thought was one of the five best friends in my life.”
“She sent an email from Africa to a mutual friend in Australia who'd asked for my email address, and, because my name was in the body of the email, I got inadvertently sent this email.”
Grant explained that the message “arrived on a day when I had heard for a third time that a film that I’d written and was about to direct, the finances had collapsed. And I was doing the final episode of Frasier,” which aired in May 2004.
He said that the email contained “such toxicity” that he immediately decided to cut off the friendship.
“And I thought, ‘That's not a real friend anymore.’ And I was absolutely devastated,” Grant said. “So I copied and pasted that and then sent it back. And I said, ‘29 years of friendship?’”
Asked what the offensive comments were about, Grant replied: “It was of my script that I had written, which was entirely autobiographical.” Grant’s 2005 comedy Wah-Wah was loosely based on his own life. “And she had read this script.”
He said that years later, his daughter, now 37, had questioned whether the friendship was really genuine in the first place.
“Our daughter was very smart, because she was 16, so exactly 20 years ago. She said to me, ‘In your heart of hearts, haven’t you always known this about that person?’”
Grant added that the turn of events was “just brutal.”
“Because that person knows you in the most formative part of your life, when you're still dreaming of getting regular work out there as an actor,” Grant said. “Nevermind the other things that have happened to me since. So when you’re betrayed like that, there’s no going back for me.”
The British actor is best known for his breakthrough as the antihero of Withnail and I, aged 29, and for his Oscar-nominated turn in 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?
His recent roles have included The Thursday Murder Club, based on Richard Osman’s best-selling crime novel, and Nuremberg, which follows a psychiatrist who evaluates Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War.
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