Richard E Grant is getting reflective about his stint in the Spice Girls movie.
The Oscar nominee played music manager Clifford in Spice World, and in a new interview with the podcast Reign With Josh Smith, the British performer admitted that some of his peers in the acting world were aghast at his decision to accept the role.
“At the time, the amount of very grand actors who said to me, ‘how can you possibly be in Spice World: The Movie’. You whore!” he recalled. “And I said, ’absolutely! Whore central! Delighted!”
Richard then admitted the “pay-off” came 20 years later, when Spice Girls superfan Adele gave him free tickets to her sold-out tour.
“I met her afterwards, and she said, ‘I can’t look you in the eye, you’re a god to me!’,” he claimed.
He also revealed that when Lena Dunham cast her in a short arc in her hit sitcom Girls, she was only aware of Richard thanks to his work in Spice World.
“All those grandees who said, ‘how can you whore yourself?’… well, I got Adele tickets, her autograph and two series out of Lena Dunham. So, win-win, baby! Fuck them!” he added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Richard admitted he accepted the role because his daughter was such a fan of the chart-topping girl group at the time.
“My daughter was eight, and she was completely possessed of them,” he explained. “She had those platform shoes, t-shirts, her hair was done like them, I’d never seen anyone so crazed, apart from me and Barbra Streisand.
“So, I brought her back from school and she pressed the answering machine in my study – you know, pre-internet – and there was a message saying, ‘you have been offered the Spice World manager, Clifford, in Spice World: The Movie’.
“And she just came through frothing, hysterical, jumped up on me like a spider monkey and she said – ‘dad you have to do this so I can meet the Spice Girls’. So I did. So I had two terms’ worth at her school of being treated like a god.”
In a 2021 interview with Vulture about Spice World, Richard recalled: “I had just turned 40, and they were about half my age. And Scary Spice, Mel B, pinched my bum on the first day and said, ‘You’re not bad for an old guy’.
“I thought, ‘If that’s a seal of approval from the rowdiest of the Spice Girls, then I was A for away’. They just seemed able to talk about anything. They were so uninhibited, and so thrilled with the success that they had, that it was hard not to be taken up by all that energy.”
The film also featured impressive appearances from the likes of Roger Moore, Meat Loaf, Elton John, Jennifer Saunders and Stephen Fry.
