Paul McGann

Withnail and I: What a Piece of Work

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Withnail & I

Set in the dying days of the 1960s, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors is a triumph of screenwriting and a brilliant showcase for then-unknown stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.

By David Cairns | May 2025

Bruce Robinson’s gift for colorful language is the most striking mark of his talent. This has doubtless held him back in places where translation is required or such dexterity is not appreciated. He himself once noted that a sentence in Withnail and I (1987), “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake,” hilarious and obviously absurd to a native English speaker, could lose everything as a subtitle: something like “We’ve erroneously gone on holiday” isn’t funny at all.

“The history of its meat clung about this house like a climate.” This is a line from Robinson’s sole published novel, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, and again it illustrates his gift for the grisly but amusing turn of phrase. His signature tone is disgust.

Robinson began as an actor, eventually rising to the foothills of near stardom—François Truffaut cast him opposite Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H. (1975). But before that disappointment—Robinson loved the director but hated his own performance—there were, as they say, the early years of bitter struggle, and these, along with the decline of the sixties dream, are what Robinson documents in Withnail and I.

Marwood, the “I” character, is nakedly Robinson, wearing a lifelike Paul McGann costume. But Withnail, immortally played by Richard E. Grant, is Robinson, too, though he was substantially inspired by another unemployed actor friend. Marwood embodies Robinson’s paranoid aspect, while the shifty Withnail supplies him with plenty to be paranoid about.

Mainly focusing on these two characters (or one bifurcated one), the film must make a lot out of a little. It’s 1969, and two out-of-work actors, Marwood and Withnail, who share a dilapidated flat in London, take a holiday in the Lake District. Then they come back. That is the plot. Fortunately, the characters’ tendency toward exaggeration means there’s constant drama—they are, after all, actors. Marwood nervously hypes every crisis to hysterical heights, while Withnail oscillates between outrage, bravado, blind terror, and self-pity. If anything actually happened, it might be unbearable.

The script begins, more or less, with this scene description: “Dostoevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs.” A brilliant, grimly whimsical joke, but impossible to actually represent on-screen. You can’t point a camera at that joke—all you’ll see is some chairs. But it starts the reader off on a note of mordant elation that the film must find more gradually.

Before the script there was Robinson’s unpublished novel, written when the misery of unemployment had reached its awful climax and Robinson had to laugh to keep from crying. Unemployment has always been treated as something akin to a criminal offense, but it was once possible to live and do creative work on the dole, if you didn’t mind being miserable, and British culture was incredibly enriched by many of those who pulled off this tricky feat.

Everyone recognized the brilliance of Robinson’s eventual script: they just didn’t want to make it. Fortunately, David Puttnam, a former adman emerging as the savior of British cinema, commissioned Robinson to write The Killing Fields (1984)—which won three Oscars and eight BAFTAs, including Best Adapted Screenplay—and George Harrison, the Beatle turned producer, gave Robinson a chance to direct his dream project at Harrison’s company Handmade Films. The Killing Fields, Harrison once said, was exactly the kind of film he didn’t want to make—he preferred comedies. He’d fallen into cinema when Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) lost its budget at the eleventh hour, he mortgaged his house to back it, and it was such a hit that he kept on gambling. Eventually Harrison may have had cause to regret that decision—his producing partner’s fraudulence nearly bankrupted him—but British cinema benefited enormously from Handmade’s support of original filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan.

Robinson’s success with Killing Fields meant he was now worth £250,000 per script. He sold Withnail and I to Handmade for a pound, so the company could feel it was cutting a profit already, and then spent much of his directing fee on shooting the scenes that Handmade had originally wanted cut. I saw the film at its 1987 Edinburgh International Film Festival premiere, where everyone laughed themselves sick. And then waited for it to actually get released. And waited.

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Withnail And I: How a Beatle-funded comedy about alcoholic actors became a cult classic

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By Nick Duerden

Two men stride through a quaint Cumbrian village on an overcast Saturday afternoon, long overcoats flapping behind them. Newly and unusually flush with cash, the pair have been gifted money from a relative. Said relative has ordered them to get better equipped for a weekend in the countryside by buying Wellington boots. The men, however, have other ideas. Specifically: pub. Here, they drink themselves drunk until closing time, and then decide belatedly to line their stomachs in a tea room next door.

Only… the quaint village is unused to bohemian types in advanced states of disrepair, and does not take kindly to their presence. They are asked to leave — but the pair prove resistant. They want cake, the taller one bellows, and — in a line that would go on to become immortal in the canon of British cinema — “the finest wines known to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now”.

This was Withnail and I — a small film largely overlooked upon its 1987 cinematic release but now widely considered among the most-loved British motion pictures of all time, and surely the funniest. It would prove an impressive calling card for its two leading men, Richard E Grant and Paul McGann, a film both of them could trade off forever. It wasn’t an instant, era-defining hit, but instead, took time to find its audience, becoming a cult hit before ultimately being bestowed with classic status.

“When it first came out, there was nothing else quite like it, and the distributors really didn’t know what to do with it,” says Murray Close, the film’s on-set photographer whose prints from it still sell regularly to collectors around the world. Close has shot many movies over his illustrious career — The Shining, Jurassic Park, Batman — but, he suggests, “People just want to talk to me about Withnail. It’s always Withnail.”

Richard E Grant and Paul McGann

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Happy Birthday, Eighth Doctor Paul McGann!

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Paul McGann

Happy birthday, Paul McGann! Born in Liverpool to a metallurgist and a teacher, McGann is one of five children—four of whom found their way into showbiz.

A member of the so-called “Brit Pack” (alongside big names like Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Colin Firth), the Liverpudlian actor turned his attention to television. It wasn’t until 1996, though, that McGann’s nerd credit was established. [ . . . ] More: Happy Birthday, Eighth Doctor Paul McGann! – Geek.com

Pulling Focus: Withnail and I (1987)

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Pulling Focus: Withnail and I (1987)26 NOVEMBER 2016 FEATURES, REVIEWS BY SHANE SCOTT-TRAVIS

“The best British comedy ever made? Possibly. A masterpiece? Unquestionably.”– Ali Catterall, Film4

From the tender and impassioned sound of King Curtis’ live recorded cover of Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in the opening scene to the finishing drizzly goodbye by the wolf enclosure in Regent’s Park, Withnail and I is a funny, affectionate, and wistful perfection from writer/director Bruce Robinson.

While Robinson has never been a prolific filmmaker and his following films so far have proven a tad unfulfilling by comparison, nothing can temper or depreciate the strikingly idiosyncratic pleasures of his coming out party, Withnail and I. A lamentably sentimental comic chronicle of impoverished living in late-1960s Camden Town, the Swinging Sixties as presented by Robinson is a booze-fuelled, bleak and grimy place of dreggy pubs, unkempt cafes, and offensively filthy kitchens.

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