'I’m going to blow your brains out': Iconic actor says his alcoholic father tried to shoot him dead as a child

The 67-year-old actor has spoken out about his upbringing in Swaziland, now known as Eswatini, South Africa, and has said that his dad Henrik “pulled the trigger” at the back of his head and chillingly told him ‘I’m going to blow your brains out’.

“He tried to shoot me when I was 15 when I emptied all his Scotch supply down the sink,” he told Davina McCall on her Begin Again podcast. “I was half way through [pouring] the eleventh bottle, gun at the back of my head, I ducked, went off, ran to the garden – he finally found me, said ‘I’m going to blow your brains out’.”

The Saltburn, Games of Thrones and Doctor Who star said that he pleaded with his dad to “do it, just get this over and done with. His father did then pull the trigger, he revealed, but because he was drunk “it wavered, so it went straight past”.

This wasn’t the only dark childhood memory that Grant spoke about to McCall. He said that his mum, Leonne, also caused pain as he once walked in on her and his father’s best friend in an “intimate situation”. “I knew that I was seeing something that I shouldn’t – I didn’t really understand what they were doing,” he said.

The Oscar-nominated actor has previously recalled another time where his dad tried to shoot him after he snuck out of the house when he was 15 years old to see A Clockwork Orange at the cinema, which had an 18 rating because it features disturbing images, violent scenes and scenes of a sexual nature.

He told the Radio Times: “It had a triple-X rating, and you couldn’t see it until you were 18 years old. So I snuck in by telling the woman who was at the box office that she looked just like Elizabeth Taylor.”

When returned home, however, his drunken father was furious he'd gone to see the film, and in his anger he took a gun, put it to his son’s temple and pulled the trigger. But, once again he missed.

Henrik died from lung cancer at age 52 in 1981. Leonne died at the age of 93 in 2023. Decades after his dad’s death, Grant’s wife of 35 years, Joan Washington, also died of lung cancer. Dialect coach Washington died at the age of 74 in September 2021, just eight months after she was diagnosed with stage four of the disease.

The couple met in 1986 and married later that year. They shared a daughter Olivia, now 36. Their first daughter, Tiffany, died shortly after birth when she was born prematurely. Washington also had a son called Tom Washington from a previous relationship, who became Grant’s stepson.

In an interview last year, Grant said he still writes to his late wife every day as the thought of her not being here is too much for him to bear.