ROB RINDER: What Happens When Your Dream Doesn’t Work Out | GREAT MOMENTS

Rob Rinder first came into our lives as Judge Rinder, Britain’s answer to Judge Judy, and we quickly fell in love with his quick wit and intelligence. Since then, the criminal barrister turned broadcaster has won a BAFTA with Rylan Clark for Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour, been awarded an MBE for his work in Holocaust education, and written Sunday Times bestselling novels. But long before he walked into the courtroom, Rob dreamed of becoming an actor. In this Great Moment, Rob opens up about how he created a different version of himself to fit in, why he walked away from what he thought was his life’s calling, and what came next. Listen to the full episode HERE https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hepMZWJC5LpuQv08vGT4V?si=XmYUxGurTBmR86B9HvgcpA! If you enjoyed the show, you can also follow us: Instagram-@greatcompanypodcast https://www.instagram.com/greatcompanypodcast/# TikTok -@greatcompanypodcast https://open.acast.com/networks/611e511b4ec6dc00134bced2/shows/65d737dfdc02e00016c413b2/episodes/www.tiktok.com/@greatcompanypodcast And if you've got thoughts, questions and comments, you can email us at: [email protected] THE CREDITS Assistant Producer: Issy Weeks-Hankins Video: Josh Bennett Social Media: Laura Coughlan Exec Producers: Ewan Newbigging-Lister & Jemima Rathbone Great Company is an original podcast from JamPot Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:05Jamie Laing?

  Hello, everyone. I'm Jamie Laing and this is Great Moments.

• 2:11Jamie Laing?

  Hey, everyone. I hope you're well and welcome back to Great Moments. Now, if you're new here, this is the place where I'm going to bring you a standout moment from one of my favorite great comedy conversations. These are the moments that have stayed with me long after the recording and I hope you can take something away from them. Now, if today's conversation leaves you wanting more, you can find the link to the full episode in the show notes. So sit back, settle in, and here it is.

• 2:36Jamie Laing?

  I think you're going to struggle in this episode because, because you're a great interviewer. And whenever I interview people who are great interviewers and do it as their job, which you do, because I was running this morning on my running machine and you were on my TV right there with Ranveer, who is lovely. And with interviewers, you find it hard to be interviewed because you're used to be interviewing.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  Well, I don't think it's that I'm an interviewer that's going to cause you a problem. It's that I spent years, you know, as a barrister and most importantly, I'm not desperately interested in me. And so when people ask me about my world, I tend to, as you will have no doubt noticed, and very thoughtfully and strategically throat cleared in that way, deflect. So if I didn't want to answer the question, I'll change the question. And then generally speaking, we'll try and get us to a place where in a concept, we're actually talking about you instead. But that's just my general discomfort about talking about me.

• 3:33Jamie Laing?

  But why? Why you, why do you not find it counterintuitive? Because you are so, you are so interesting. You really are. The things that you've done, I know, but you are, just lean into it for, lean into it for a second. Here we go. Lean into it. You are so interesting. The life that you've led, the people that you've met, the jobs that you've done, the things that you have learned and studied. I spoke to, I think it was Alan Carr, you're friendly with Alan Carr. You read a book a week, pretty much.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  I used to, yeah.

• 4:02Jamie Laing?

  So you also, your knowledge of everything from the arts to the history, to the law, to, to politics, whatever it is, is so vast. And I'm really buttering you up.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  But how do you feel when you sit across tables, usually at television meetings?

• 4:17Jamie Laing?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Where people give you compliments of that kind. Is there no part of your body?

• 4:22Jamie Laing?

  Yeah, I seize up.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. It's like you're looking for protruding parts of your body left a cringe. You know, you're so clever and immediately you, what springs to mind is the people that are clever than you. And there's just a sense of just that enduring spiritual cringe. Aren't you marvelous? I mean, and frankly, anybody who doesn't have that intuitive impulse at that point of people listing how great they are, is generally, is likely to be a problematic and be certainly no friend of mine.

• 4:54Jamie Laing?

  Okay, you're a dick.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Thank you. That's better. Don't we, oh, that's so reliable.

• 4:59Jamie Laing?

  Do you like that?

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Oh, fantastic. There she is.

• 5:01Jamie Laing?

  You're a big dick.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  You could have stuck on dick. There you are. So much more comfortable, isn't it?

• 5:08Jamie Laing?

  Does that make you feel better?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:10Jamie Laing?

  Well, I tell you what, your show with Ryland, we had Ryland on and do you know what he said? He spoke about what a real friend is. And he was describing you as, how you are just a true friend. It was really, you should listen to it. It was amazing what he said about you.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  He makes me smile. Well, because real friendship is, isn't it? It's not the people who'd be there in the middle of the night. I mean, the emergency services will do that for you. And there's usually someone, usually rather toxic, who'll crowbar themselves into your emotional drama. Be wary. It's a bit like The Godfather, you know, the person who comes first to your tragedy is often problematic. It's when things go really well, who can you telephone that's going to sit alongside you and celebrate with unfettered joy? That's who your mates are, right?

• 5:51Jamie Laing?

  And he's that. And what's, you've got your amazing hotels, which is coming out, which?

• 5:56Speaker 04

  With Monica.

• 5:56Jamie Laing?

  We saw each other.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. This is such a story. We've got to tell people this.

• 6:00Jamie Laing?

  Can we sell this story?

• 6:01Speaker 04

  I can't say where it is, actually, because the series has been.

• 6:04Jamie Laing?

  It's in a location somewhere in the world.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, it's where there's lots of parties and clubs and rhymes with Elitha.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  For fuck's sake, I used to keep state secrets. It's so funny. Television gets so nervous around this sort of stuff.

• 6:18Jamie Laing?

  I know.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Whereas I just sort of sit in meetings with, you know, the clandestine service and they'd be infinitely less worried.

• 6:23Jamie Laing?

  Anyway, so we, we're a beautiful hotel in something that sounds like.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I hadn't, so, so I actually got married in Ibiza and had a wonderful wedding. And although the marriage didn't last, Ibiza was very much our special place. Anyway, through a variety of extraordinary reasons, which won't mean much perhaps to lots of listeners, but much like a Noel Coward play, Private Lives, I discovered that I was going to be filming there completely, genuinely, coincidentally, at the same time as my ex-husband was going to be holidaying there with his new partner. He's not that new. They've been together for about five years. But we don't socialize and hadn't really met each other. Just happens I was going to be there serving the cocktails on telly whilst my ex-husband's been. So inevitably, you're going to work out for that moment and practice your chat.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  I was with my best friend, who thank goodness, you know, manages me. So, you know, we hadn't prepared what to say, but she could intervene and pull me away. I don't do very well with first encounter. I'm a lot. You've met me, right? We've got, I mean, we've just scratched the surface.

• 7:26Jamie Laing?

  I know. It's great.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  So there was me finally bumping into my ex-husband. It was like a moment and he was very nice and we were chatting. But it's self-evidently, the nuclear-powered orcs, what do you talk about? You know, when you've sort of got married up the road and, you know, a history behind one another. And then there's this partner there who I've only, you know, superficially met before, who also, I must emphasize, very lovely. But, you know, you're, of course, you'd be lying if you weren't saying that. You're standing there trying not to breathe out.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  And then I'm having a perfectly nice chat and out of nowhere came this charming voice going, oh, hi. Gosh, my old friend. All the various ways that you introduce yourself in a way that immediately makes me sort of react in a way that, is he being disingenuous or does he actually like me? But I think you are.

• 8:17Jamie Laing?

  Yeah, I'm so.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  No, it takes a lot of time for me to be satisfied that you're real.

• 8:22Jamie Laing?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, because, you know, you are, it turns out. But, you know, lots of people with that.

• 8:28Jamie Laing?

  There's an air of, there can be an air, especially in the industry, there can be an air of sort of fakeness to it in a way, because it's like.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  At the fucking least, I've seen way more sociopathy in, you know, the world that we, this inhabits than I have, you know, sitting across tables from people in Belmarsh. I mean, that, you know, it's, people sort of invent personas when it's bullshit. But I'm standing with my ex-husband and then you come along and I say, oh, this is my wife and this is my ex-husband. And you thought that I was taking the piss?

• 8:55Jamie Laing?

  I thought you were joking.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was like my first encounter and then, because obviously it looks cool because he's, I think, probably plugged into kind of cool culture. And I had, you know, Radio 1 DJ, it's like my bestie, hanging there with your really hot wife. So which of course decorated.

• 9:11Jamie Laing?

  She was looking very hot, yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  She was decorating the whole thing. So it just is important that counter. Look, it would be a lie if you didn't want to say you wanted to look slightly six-backy and also a little bit connected and quite rich. And you delivered that for me. So I'm grateful.

• 9:24Jamie Laing?

  Benedict Cumberbatch was your, he.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  Married us.

• 9:28Jamie Laing?

  Married you.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 9:29Jamie Laing?

  That is a flex.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Not really.

• 9:33Jamie Laing?

  Is a.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  It's a flex if you get like Benedict Cumberbatch, who's in the Marvel movies as Doctor Strange and you hire him and you've got fuckloads of money. Your dad happens to be an Uzbek oligarch, in which case it's a flex. If he's been your mate since the age of 17, it's a mate, isn't it? I mean, and you would have asked him regardless of the fact that he was famous. But it is true that I gave up acting after seeing him act. That's true.

• 9:58Jamie Laing?

  But give me the story. I want to hear this.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  So I'd given up acting because I'd, when I say I wasn't bright at school, I was very average until I got to 61 college. And there was a teacher there who totally changed my life. Simply by, she's just said something like, you're clever, aren't you? And it's never occurred to me. And it really was as banal as that. And from there, it was like a switch went on. Truly. And I, I became completely absorbed in everything and anything academic, catching up for lost time in everything. Right. So I was very much sort of thinking of perhaps a career in law, but certainly was very interested in academic things and,

• 10:45Speaker 04

  you know, took university very seriously and got a first. But I thought, well, I'd go and, actually, I got a triple first, but I don't think you should hide any lights under any bushels about that sort of thing. But I thought, first day, I'd have a go at acting because I had an okay time at the National Youth Theatre. I'd done the summer course, which I have to do. The next year I did Julius Caesar.

• 11:05Jamie Laing?

  And it's a big deal getting that.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  Churriatel Edgio four was in it. I mean, you know.

• 11:09Jamie Laing?

  Wow.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was Julius Caesar. He doesn't seem to remember me whenever I see him. It's like, it's like a sort of a rather sort of embarrassing ex-lover. Sort of looks at me like my first driving examiner. Who stopped halfway around our course and asked whether I was trying to kill us both. That sort of parody said, I hide to a tell you about nothing. Anyway, I'm sure he remembers me fondly. I was Lucius in that, but I sort of gave up after that. I just didn't think I was.

• 11:36Jamie Laing?

  But you saw Benedict, you saw him.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  I saw him at university. He read, well, I read the part first and I thought, well, it went rather well. And I could feel, because you can tell the director.

• 11:45Jamie Laing?

  Oh, that's quite good.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Hello, Julia Martinez, director. And then, I don't know who was, I heard Benedict read it.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  And it was just like, different. And it's more than different. It's a difference between you, I wouldn't have been able to articulate what it was then, but I know what it is now. It's that sense where you know that you'll never achieve that. It's the type of talent that is the difference between becoming an artist and being one.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  And what great actors can do, and he, I really believe, has, and so few do, is he has this gift, that's what it is, in the way that great musicians, most certain others can play from when they're little, to physically inhabit the body of a character from an energy point, from a voice, from the way that a chin might move in a scene. And that's the stuff that is just different from the type of thing I could do, which was mimicry, which would have resulted, given how good I am at networking and a fairly average part in the wall pack. And from time to time, you know, having a speaking bit on casualty.

• 13:04Jamie Laing?

  Wow.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  But I never would have, as they say in With Nayle and I, played the dane.

• 13:08Jamie Laing?

  So you, you saw it and you were just like, that is.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, fuck it. I mean, look at that. But with love.

• 13:15Jamie Laing?

  Yeah, of course.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  Because, I mean, really with love.

• 13:17Jamie Laing?

  But this is what's interesting about that. You, you, you went into acting and from what I read and found out is that you went and did it and you really loved it, but you realised you weren't as good as your peers. And so there you thought, well, they're better than me, so I'm not going to do it. Is that right?

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Um, sort of partially right.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  I, I got into National Youth Theatre quite young, you know, and I went to, oh, I'm from the type of background where, you know, being an actor wasn't exactly an aspirational job. And it wasn't a thing that your parents were delighted by.

• 13:50Jamie Laing?

  Explain that to me, what do you mean?

• 13:51Speaker 04

  Well, I come from a, despite the fact that, you know, I, I use this a lot, but I hope it means something to your listeners. Hello out there, read the Mitfords. I sound like I've been mugged by one, you know, like the voice of the queen. This is not real. I mean, I am, my voice is an artifice. It's a complete fiction. I go up, you know, around the corner from Amy Winehouse and in a blended, by blended, I mean, class and ethnically blended community, went to the same school, but my dad was a taxi driver and they also, white winky, that's how they all sound. High winky, by the way, white foxy. That's, see, that's how I grew up. And then at the age of three, and it's no offence to them, although it sounds like a deliberate one.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  I, I sort of rather felt that I'd spiritually, intellectually and culturally outgrown them and had enough. So I invented this. People, I think, feel slight discomfort when you talk about parents in any way that's not exactly, not, not unkind. Let me put it this way, you know, I think it's important to be honest.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  When I grew up, I wasn't surrounded by people who I had an intuitive sense at that time of respect for. It wasn't the sort of idea that, you know, you see your teachers at school and then you see them like in the supermarket and they're like, that's from teacher land. I mean, these are people who you reach beyond your fingertips to sort of know they're special in some way. I mean, I think it's being authentic about my early, very early childhood. I was, obviously I've re-remembered this and re-curated my memory from being older, but I sort of remember being surrounded by people who I thought, I clearly got nothing in common with any of you. I'm not even sure you're unrelated. I mean, yeah.

• 15:39Jamie Laing?

  That's early to realise that.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  I know. They didn't have Jeremy Carlin. It was such a pity. Because I could have been one of those DNA test, looking really disappointed at four, going, you are related to your family. Fuck.

• 15:50Jamie Laing?

  You're like Stewie from Family Guy. That's what you're like.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  I can live with that. I used to get taken to all these like posh houses, like Hatfield House, and then they'd take me home. This is fucking absurd. Clearly I live here.

• 16:00Jamie Laing?

  You're like this highly intelligent child that believes you've been born in the wrong world. You're like, what is going on here?

• 16:06Speaker 04

  It's totally genuine. It's not like.

• 16:07Jamie Laing?

  No, I love that it's genuine.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  I didn't aspire to, I didn't like, sort of, I didn't want to be there. And so I invented this voice, you know, then, I mean, I remember. White winky, white foxy, ear well, go give your dad a pair. I'll go give you a pair if you got your dad and say this. I remember that and must I go, and then, um, what, come fuck, what, got your dad, got your dad and say, and usually it would be something disgusting. And I go, all right.

• 16:54Speaker 00

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