When the script for Richard E Grant’s latest role landed on his desk, his agent told him he had 24 hours to read it and decide whether or not to take the part. “I said, ‘What is this, Mission Impossible?’,” Grant recalls, craning conspiratorially forward over his pot of English breakfast tea. “‘Who’s dropped dead or who’s dropped out?’”

The answer – out, rather than dead, mercifully – was the Irish actor Chris O’Dowd. The long-in-limbo film he had left behind was about the literary forger Lee Israel, whose faked letters from such great writers as Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward sold to collectors for hundreds of dollars in the Nineties. The production had stalled after its original lead, Julianne Moore, pulled out in the summer of 2015, a week before filming was due to commence. By the time Melissa McCarthy, of Bridesmaids fame, had been cast in her place, O’Dowd, who was due to play Israel’s co-conspirator Jack Hock, was required elsewhere, and another replacement had to be found fast.

Enter Grant, at speed. “I met Melissa on a Friday afternoon in the middle of January in Manhattan,” he says, “and we started shooting on the Monday.” His rehearsal time amounted to a lunch with McCarthy and the director, Marielle Heller, and half a day’s sussing out scenes: “And I had to beg Marielle for that. Originally Melissa was just coming in from LA for a costume fitting.”