Skip to content

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Rain

Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in The X-Files Pilot (1993).

Rain appeals to my melancholic inclination, and makes me think of many things I love: seeking refuge from the storm in The Old Dark House; sheltering at the Rashōmon city gate to stay dry; the debate on the Declaration of Independence in 1776; seeking refuge from a different storm in The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Roy Batty’s last words in Blade Runner; Billy Kinetta’s revelation in “Paladin of the Last Hour”; Claudia comforting Lisa in the aptly titled “A Rainy Night”; the smell of a Labrador having shaken the rain off her fur; Rob McKenna in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; the pelting of Collinwood (and/or the Old House) in Dark Shadows; Mulder and Scully at any given moment in the first five years of The X-Files; Charles and Tommy’s talk in Four Weddings and a Funeral; Andy Dufresne’s freedom in The Shawshank Redemption; my first two rain-soaked short stories, “After the Fall” and “Last Night”; Billy Shipton’s last hour in “Blink”; and others that aren’t coming to mind.

Charles (Hugh Grant) and Tom (James Fleet) in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

I used to love the rain, and it saddened me that I lived in place where it doesn’t happen as frequently as I’d like. But now, when it does happen—as it’s happening right now—I worry about something completely out of my hands, a vestigial obligation of friendship that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. The once-pleasant melancholy inclines to inescapable despondency, and I wonder if a favorite has slipped away…

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) features the speech I delivered at each acting audition I attempted during my theatrical phase. It worked every time but once, and I suspect…that is I think…that there really wasn’t much acting, per se, to be done. The accent was the only bit of performance, and—not to blow my horn—it was terribly good, but to put it a slightly different way, those auditions felt like dropping the daily performance and being myself…which is odd, given that I have a last name and a job and am married, though not to anyone I met at a wedding, despite the apparent probabilities of that sort of thing.

Carrie (Andie McDowell) and Charles (Hugh Grant) in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).