“Iam not a big drinker, I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke,” says Sagar Radia, best known as the ruthless, potty-mouthed trader Rishi Ramdani in the HBO/BBC banking saga Industry. “But when friends and family watch, they’re like: ‘You look like you do know what you’re doing.’”
Nowhere was this more the case than in season three’s White Mischief, an episode focused entirely on the character’s grim descent into gambling addiction, inflamed by booze and cocaine. Previously described by a colleague as “the ghost of Margaret Thatcher in a handsome Asian kid”, here Rishi starts to look more like a disgraced Tory MP in the 90s, as he binges on shots and coke in a seedy casino. At first he’s euphoric – dancing like a drunk uncle at a wedding – but soon his behaviour becomes erratic, his movements shaky and impaired, his legs unsteady. Despite rising debts, he gambles away all he has, and even seems to consider pawning his wedding ring for a few, long seconds. The next morning, we see him stagger into work on a comedown – bloody cuts and bruises all over his face.
Be it on film or TV, it does feel as though we are seeing more of these emotional – and occasionally absurd – rock-bottom moments, with increasingly hardcore amounts of drink and drugs swilling around in characters’ systems. Industry and the Zendaya-led drama Euphoria are oft-cited examples. But who could forget Murray Bartlett’s out-of-control hotel manager Armond in the first season of The White Lotus, a recovering addict who falls off the wagon so severely that he decides to defecate in a bratty guest’s suitcase? Season two was equally marked by the presence of powder and pills, not least when Jennifer Coolidge’s already dopey Tanya is plied with party drugs at a Sicilian villa (after that series aired, one fan wrote on Twitter/X that judging the Emmys would be “tough this year as cocaine, viagra, and molly battle it out for best supporting actor”). Cinema isn’t immune, either. A new “proper naughty” hooliganism comedy, Marching Powder, sees Danny Dyer reunite with The Football Factory director Nick Love for what the actor has described as a film with “more violence [and] more drugs” than its predecessor, released back in 2004.
Of course, we know that actors aren’t likely to be necking tequilas or snorting the devil’s dandruff on screen; on Industry, the actors sniff milk powder rather than cocaine, and once the director shouts “Cut!” someone brings over a tissue and the actors blow out as much as they can. But how do they manage to make it look so real? Ironically, a great amount of focus is required for this kind of acting. For Radia, somewhat counterintuitively, that meant concentrating hard on appearing sober. On set, Konrad Kay, one of Industry’s showrunners, advised him to steady his legs, so as not to overcompensate. “It’s that classic thing of drunk people not trying to play drunk,” Radia says. “Drunk people are trying to be sober!”
His attention was also on the personal and professional pressure bubbling under the surface that might lead someone like Rishi to misuse drugs and alcohol in the first place. “I think if you’re trying to [act these scenes] without a sense of ‘Where is this coming from?’ and ‘Why is he sabotaging himself like this?’, then you’re just a guy playing drunk, and it makes no sense,” he says. “I didn’t think too much about the substances. I was thinking more about the pressures – whether it was his wife, his kid, his debt, or how much money he was losing at work. You bring all of that into his walk, his thousand-yard stare, his longing when he’s lost the money …”
It would be naive to think that great acting underpinned all depictions of drink and drug use on screen. Method acting has definitely played its part: James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli were once so sozzled on the set of The Sopranos that they chained themselves to a tree so they wouldn’t fall off a cliff. For Withnail and I – a comedy as alcoholic as it is melancholic – Richard E Grant was encouraged by director Bruce Robinson to drink, in order to have a “chemical memory” of inebriation. Despite an intolerance to the stuff, Grant has said that Robinson sent him home during rehearsals for the film with a bottle of champagne, and told him to “work your way through that, even if you vomit in between – which I did all night long.” Meanwhile, Billy Bob Thornton’s liquor-fuelled mall meltdown in Bad Santa was powered by an actual binge (he would later tell Entertainment Weekly: “I drank about three glasses of red wine for breakfast … then I switched over to vodka and cranberry juice, and then I had a few Bud Lights”). There are also the more troubling tales of actors turning up drunk for unrelated reasons, such as Oliver Reed who – says Ridley Scott – “probably had a couple of pints [during the filming of Gladiator] … said, ‘I don’t feel good’, laid on the carpet and died.”
These days, unsurprisingly, drinking on set is less acceptable, though not totally unheard of – especially when a performer is struggling with an alcohol problem off screen. “There have been times when an actor has substituted their non-alcoholic drink with an alcoholic one,” says Matt Longley, who also cites what he describes as a “one-off” example of an actor who managed to get their hands on some booze at a filming location (it was, after all, a shoot at a pub).
Longley is one of the founders of 6ft from the Spotlight, a non-profit that aims to support cast and crew in the filming of difficult material, and whose “wellbeing facilitators” are to portrayals of drugs and alcohol – or any other potentially problematic subject matter – what an intimacy coordinator would be to a sex scene. The organisation has to date trained 40 people to go on to sets, completing risk assessments and offering support to cast and crew, “from the SAs [supporting artistes, AKA extras] to the Mark Ruffalos of the world”. Industry is one production that benefits from a wellbeing facilitator.
“Our whole ethos is to be preventive, and to try to work out what the issues might be before we start, by going through the script,” says Longley. “We offer training beforehand as well, so that people can support each other through that process, and also support themselves.” On some productions, he says, directors want something to happen that the performers don’t know about, in order to capture an authentic reaction (think: a character who we suspect takes drugs, suddenly snorting a line in front of their colleagues). “Much like an intimacy coordinator, we would say, ‘No, I wouldn’t do that.’ They’re actors, they’re able to act a reaction!”
In the US, a similar role has also started to become more widespread. Mental health coordinators now work across all of the major networks, according to Amanda Edwards, a therapist and intimacy coordinator who has spearheaded the movement. Coordinators support actors and crew in a similar way to their UK counterparts, and also offer guidance around the acting process itself. “It’s about how to act the thing without traumatising yourself, or risking injury to yourself,” says Edwards. This can mean finding ways to adjust an actor’s breath and how they move the muscles in their face, or modifying their speech patterns, vocal intonation and posture. “There are so many tricks that we can use so that a performer doesn’t actually have to feel or even imagine that they are feeling the effects of a substance; they can just make their body do the things it would do if it was under the influence.”
It is as important to think about how to get into character as it is to think about how to get out of it once production has wrapped, says Edwards. There are, she says, “documented cases of crew members who maybe have a sober journey behind them, but through participating in a project that involves substance use, have gone into a relapse or have struggled tremendously with their mental health”. In 2023, Euphoria’s Dominic Fike, who was struggling with addiction at the time, talked about the impact filming the HBO series had on him: “I was a drug addict and coming on to a show that’s … mainly about drugs, is very difficult” (he was subsequently provided with a sober coach on set).
If this all sounds rather heavy, then it’s a relief to know that acting drunk, high or both on screen can be a welcome challenge. In a 2021 interview, Murray Bartlett told the Observer that playing Armond had been “a gift. There were moments of terror, but mostly it was pure joy.” As for Radia, he says he had a blast. “It was an amazing moment for a south Asian actor like myself to get an opportunity to carry an episode on one of the biggest networks in the world,” he says. “I know it can seem like it’s all deep and high stakes, but actually sometimes they’re the fun things to play.”
Season three of The White Lotus is airing on Sky Atlantic & Now; Marching Powder is in cinemas 7 March.
