Few actors have been as memorably and joyously giddy during Oscar season as Richard E. Grant when he was nominated last year for his role in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" opposite Melissa McCarthy.

He didn't win, but as the U.K. paper the Telegraph put it, "The next best thing to actually clutching an Oscar — maybe even better, in the long run — is being the guy everyone thinks should have won instead."

He currently stars on the AMC series "Dispatches From Elsewhere." The series is fictional, Grant said, but the idea for it was based on "a documentary called 'The Institute,' which is about a cult that existed in San Francisco about a decade ago that was run by a guy named Octavio — which is the character that I play — who basically recruits people who are susceptible and vulnerable and feeling lost in their lives.

"Octavio and his jejune institute, as he calls it, use virtual reality headsets enabling people to go into their past and re-enact it or relive it. So it's about identity loss and self-discovery."

Grant's résumé is more varied than most, with credits spanning "Dr. Who," "Girls," "Downton Abbey," "Game of Thrones" and "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker." But the role that kick-started his career was the cult hit comedy from 1987 "Withnail and I," playing one half of a pair of hilariously grandiose failed actors perpetually drunk and slumming it in the countryside in the 1960s.

Just before filming was to begin, his wife gave birth to a baby who lived just half an hour.

"So at this very moment of professional breakthrough and joy was this unbelievable personal tragedy. That break that I got in my career has always been a double-edged thing where it marked a change in my professional circumstances irrevocably — it has led subsequently to almost every single job I've had since then — but at the same time, it also reminds me that I don't have that daughter who was born in the summer of 1986.

"The good part is that we do have a 31-year-old daughter who came along in 1989."

"Withnail and I" is a comedy, but did his grief inform any of his performance?

"I ironically have a line in the movie in a bar scene, trying to extricate myself from being beaten up by a giant of an Irishman, by saying, 'My wife is having a baby.' For me, that required no acting at all because we had just had a baby two weeks before."

How did he deliver that line without breaking down?

"Compartmentalizing, I suppose. Growing up, my father had been such a violent alcoholic. ... I think I got inured or used to the idea you have a public face to deal with something upsetting. You deal with grief — and I think we all do this — in a private way, because it is private.

"I watched the film on its 30th anniversary a few years ago, and because it has accrued this cult status and following, certainly among audiences in England, they were mouthing the lines like it was like a 'Rocky Horror' convention. I felt like an outsider looking in. I was able, for probably the first and only time, to see it from their point of view. So it was this celebratory thing, and it felt joyous rather than being a tragic reminder."