The Risk And The Reward – Richard E Grant On The Creation Of Jack

Richard E Grant: When I met ‘nose’ Aliénor Massenet of IFF with all my favourite ingredients, she confirmed that the gardenia has so far, eluded science and that every gardenia fragrance is a synthetic. The closest I’ve found to a true gardenia scent is made by Kai of Malibu. So that is why I abandoned the idea of trying to incorporate a synthetic version. The fact that gardenia resists extraction makes it all the more desirable and why it remains the Holy Grail of fragrance for me. I have always found it to be the most potent, sexy scent of them all and in no way ‘old lady-ish’. Frank Sinatra’s funeral featured over 2000 gardenia flowers and he was the least old lady-like of men!

P: I’m very curious about the practicalities of the process of making Jack. How often did you meet the perfumer? How many modifications of the scent did she have to create? What were some of the aspects you asked her to amplify or tone down?

REG: We only met twice as she lives in Paris and I was always filming in England and all over the world. However, it was a seven month process of back and forth testing, through all of which, Aliénor was supremely patient and completely collaborative. It was an amazing experience for me as an amateur to be taken seriously by a professional. In the middle of the night I combined the final two ‘almost but not quite’ favourites of all the tester blends and had my ‘Eureka’ moment. I could barely wait till Paris awoke and I could call Aliénor and say ‘This is it’. Luckily she obliged and combined the two, which is what Jack is. Precisely what I had imagined for so many years.

P: Did you communicate with Massenet directly or did you have to work through an evaluator?

REG: We had meetings via Skype and conference calls in Catherine Mitchell’s IFF office in Roehampton. Catherine is brilliant at diplomatically translating what I want into language that made sense to Aliénor. We were brutally honest with each other throughout the whole process and Aliénor and Catherine never took umbrage if I said I couldn’t stand something. Equally, it was very obvious when I loved a mix as I am an unequivocally love or loathe it, black and white personality!

P: One of Jack‘s most distinctive features is the grapefruit note. Whose idea was it to the push the fruit into the foreground? Was its inclusion a conscious attempt to go for the ‘love it or loathe it’ Marmite factor?

REG: No grapefruit note, I’m afraid. Lime and mandarin are top notes in Jack. I love citrus fruit for their sharp, clear scent which has an incredible zingy quality that renders them edible and lickable. My sole objective was to try and create a fragrance that translated what I had long imagined in my head into a bottle, and hopefully not smell like a mere variation on a hundred other established brands. So being awarded best new Independent Fragrance at the Fragrance Foundation Awards was incredible vindication and proof that if you follow your ‘nose’, you have a much better chance of being original rather than a facsimile of something else. That’s the risk and the reward of it.

P: To what extent did you have to worry about the cost of the ‘juice’? Were there some materials whose use you had to rein in because they would have made the composition too expensive?

REG: As I am a wholly self-financed ‘One Man Brand’, the ingredients I chose governed the retail cost it would need to sell at in order to make it financially feasible. During the finalisation of the follow-up perfume, Jack – Covent Garden, Aliénor found an alternative to the original rose oil I was experimenting with as it was way too expensive and I was determined to match the retail price with the original Jack.

REG: I have been loyal to only three brands. I wore Eau Sauvage as a teenager until I was 26. When I emigrated from Swaziland to London and worked as a waiter in Covent Garden, I discovered Penhaligon’s round the corner and bought Blenheim Bouquet in 1983 and wore that for almost three decades. Like Eau Sauvage, it has incredible citrus notes which I can’t get enough of.
Then I had a ‘coup de foudre’ moment in Tuscany four years ago when I was dancing with a total stranger at a party who was wearing Kai. She generously gave me a miniature vial of the oil and it is the closest scent to a gardenia I’ve yet come across. Since creating my own brand, I have of course switched allegiance to Jack!

P: I’m curious as to your thinking behind the inclusion of a marijuana note in the composition. What sort of effect were you hoping to create with its inclusion?

REG: Swaziland is the premier grower of what is called ‘Swazi Gold’ – the best marijuana on the planet. Perfect climate and soil conditions. As I grew up there and ‘partook’, its peppery, earthy scent is both very nostalgic and potently sexy to me, so wanted to include it as a top note. I did not realise at the time that it is only used in three other perfumes and would provoke so much press interest.

P: Were you worried about the fact that it might cause too many associations with grotty student digs?

REG: Not at all. I love the peppery, earthy, sexy smell of fresh marijuana leaves.

P: I think I once read somewhere that Catherine Deneuve always bought a new perfume to go with whichever character she happened to be playing at the time. Did you ever do anything of this sort? Have smells/scents been important to you in your acting career? If not, have you now looked back and wondered what sorts of perfumes some of your characters would have worn. Dr Seward? Larry Lefferts? Cort Romney??

REG: Funny you should ask that because with every character I’ve played, I’ve had an imaginary perfume in my head and then found a combination of ingredients and existing brands to fulfil the character brief. With Dr Seward being a drug addict working for Van Helsing, I imagined a medicinal aspirin-ish scent to try and disguise his addiction, whilst Larry Lefferts being a New York, Edith Wharton snob and dandy, had to have an overpowering and expensive scent to underscore his upward mobility. So I mixed two well known brands to achieve this effect. Cort Romney in Pret A Porter had his own brand and as my ‘designs’ were in fact Vivienne Westwood clothes, I wore her signature scent. Withnail would always spend his last penny on booze and drugs, so I resolved that he would have shamelessly rummaged through every perfumery spritzing himself for free without ever buying a bottle. Anything and everything to cover up the smell of booze and fags.