Richard E. Grant is opening up about a painful betrayal that ended a nearly three-decade friendship.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Mad, Sad, and Bad podcast, the actor revealed that he accidentally received an email from a close friend of almost 30 years—an email that was never meant for his eyes. According to Grant, the message had been sent from Africa to a mutual friend in Australia who had asked for his contact details. Because his name appeared in the body of the email, he was inadvertently included in the thread.
Grant said he had considered the woman one of his “five closest friends,” which made what he read all the more shocking. The email, he explained, contained “a paragraph of such toxicity” about him that he immediately reevaluated the relationship. “I thought, ‘That’s not a real friend anymore,’” he shared.
The timing only intensified the blow. Grant recalled that the message arrived on a particularly difficult day—he had just learned for the third time that financing for a film he had written and planned to direct had collapsed. At the same time, he was working on the final episode of Frasier. Already emotionally drained, the discovery left him “absolutely devastated.”
Rather than letting it pass, Grant confronted the situation head-on. He copied and pasted the toxic paragraph and sent it back to the friend with a simple but pointed message: “29 years of friendship?” The betrayal ultimately led him to cut ties, concluding that the relationship was no longer genuine.
