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Portrait photographer Stuart McClymont was asked to shoot Richard E Grant for the Sunday Times Magazine cover and interview with Chrissy Iley. He described being cast as General Pryde in the latest Star Wars:

“I got sent a scene to self-tape with ‘top secret’ written across it. It was a 1940s B-movie interrogation scene. I taped it, sent it off and didn’t think about it, and then I got a call saying, ‘The producer wants to meet you at Pinewood. They’re sending a car for you’ — and that never happens,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine.

“JJ Abrams speaks at bullet speed, like a Scorsese character, and he’s asking me if I’m going to do it or not. I said I haven’t read a script and he said, ‘Nobody gets a script,’ and then he tells me ‘You’re going to play this guy’ — but at such speed it was surreal.”

“I don’t remember him telling me the name of the character or anything,” Grant revealed. “He just gave me a big hug and said, ‘So you’re going to do it?’ And I said, of course I’m going to do it, whatever it is. And then I was told I couldn’t tell anybody anything.”