Richard E. Grant doesn’t seem to suffer fools, least of all when they treat his daughter like one.
The Academy Award-nominated actor revealed earlier this week that some “very well-known” actors behaved “appallingly” toward his daughter, Olivia Grant, while she worked as a production assistant on various British films — whose A-list stars apparently didn’t know who she was.
Grant might be best known to U.S. audiences for his role on “Game of Thrones” or his Oscar nod turn in 2019’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” ― but he’s led a decades-long career that has long imbued him with immense respect for cast and crew members alike.
When asked Monday about the “most underrated job on a film set,” Grant didn’t hesitate.
“The runners,” he told Sky News, “who are paid the least amount of money. They’re the youngsters, they get there at five in the morning and they’re the last to leave. And if anything goes wrong, they get shat on from a dizzy height.”
“I know because my daughter was a runner for two years and was appallingly treated by some very well-known household names in England,” added Grant, “who changed their tune when they found out who her father was, which made it worse.”
He admitted, “It made me damn those people even more.”
While her father didn’t identify the culprits by name, Olivia’s résumé on IMDb does indeed confirm that she worked as a runner on projects that starred Hugh Grant, Meryl Streep, Sam Claflin, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth and Felicity Jones.
Jordan Strauss/Invision/Associated Press
While endlessly curious social media users may never know who was to blame, sleuths on Reddit are certainly doing their best to find out — and have already noted that Olivia publicly praised Redmayne in 2015, suggesting it wasn’t him.
Olivia has since made a name for herself as a major casting director for films such as “The Batman,” and won the Zeitgeist Award from the Casting Society of America earlier this year for her work on 2023’s massive blockbuster “Barbie.”
When asked Monday if he ever confronted the culprits, Richard confirmed that he did — but only with “one person” whom he’d “never speak to” again.