How Greg Williams Became Hollywood’s Favourite Photographer
Robert Downey Jr beaming his head off backstage at the Baftas.
Jay-Z and Beyoncé mugging to the camera from their table at the Golden Globes.
Brad Pitt and George Clooney bromancing it up as they speedboat around the Venice Film Festival.
All these photographs are the work of Greg Williams, a name regular Esquire readers will recognise for his portraits of cover stars Tom Hardy, Eddie Redmayne and Daniel Craig, and plenty more besides.
Williams’s style is expansive, flattering, frequently black and white.
His subjects are often on the move – jumping down steps, riding in cars, collapsing onto beds.
It’s candid, too. Eva Green is smoking a fag! Florence Pugh is blowing a kiss! And is that Daniel Craig… smiling?
The A-listers look like they’re having fun, because they are. Everyone takes a better photo when they’re relaxed, and Williams, whose early career as a war photographer took him to some of the world’s least relaxed places, is a master of making his subjects feel at ease. Everyone gets along with him.
It's one talent that’s helped him become the go-to guy for Hollywood events – being a very good photographer is another – backstage, off-stage, at the after-show party.
He somehow brings the glamour of old-school Hollywood into the modern age.
That kind of access is vanishingly rare, but Williams makes it available to a wide audience – uploading the photos to his hugely popular Instagram account, or printing them in Hollywood Authentic, his self-published large-format magazine.
Now he has parlayed that aesthetic into a clothing collaboration with the high-end knitwear brand N. Peal.
This isn’t quite as random as it might sound.
N. Peal opened its doors in London in 1936 and its knits soon found fans with members of Hollywood’s Golden Age, founder Nat Peal being hailed “the British king of cashmere” and making regular visits to the USA.
Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn all wore N. Peal. More recently, the brand has kept Daniel Craig’s 007 warm from the chill of Spectre.
The new 16-piece collection, named “Hollywood Authentic x N. Peal”, features chunky-knit cardigans, cashmere t-shirts, American high-school inspired knits, and more.
In the N. Peal campaign the clothes are modelled by the James Cusati-Moyer, Tony nominated actor for Slave Play, and the model/actor Clara Rugaard.
Williams, of course, took the photos.
Esquire recently chatted to him over Zoom, from the veranda of his expansive Berkshire home.
(Later on, there was a brief laptop tour. His home included a life-size stuffed bear that Williams commissioned, a self-playing piano modelled on one in the Chateau Marmont, and an enormous bed in the living room, for watching films from a projector. “There’s more to interiors than having white walls and wooden floors and burning a beeswax candle!” Williams noted. Still, none of that translates very well here. You’ll just have to use your imaginations.)
Esquire: Hello, Greg. How did this collaboration come about, then?
Greg Williams: It’s a passion project. Hollywood Authentic started out because there weren’t a lot of magazines who would still publish the sort of photos I wanted to take. Esquire was one, both yourselves in the UK, and your American cousins. At some point before that, probably in 2014/5, the photos I wanted to take coincided with the rise of Instagram, so I just started publishing them there. When I got to a million followers I was, like, “Okay, there’s a concept here. People like the stuff that I’m doing”. So, I suppose that gave me confidence that there was still an interest for this [style of celebrity reportage photography], today. It’s been my interest for a long time. I wanted to be a photographer from the age of six. At 12, my dad bought me a book of Magnum photos from the movies. The one that struck me more than anything was Dennis Stock’s photoshoot where he took James Dean back to his home.
The one on the family farm? Where he’s playing bongos, and riding a tractor?
Yeah, and he’s in his old classroom. In fact, if you go into the back issues of Hollywood Authentic… let me drag one out [he disappears and returns with the issue]. There’s Austin Butler back at his old desk, in his old school. So, we were terribly inspired by that stuff, and inspired by the photography of the era, and the talent of the era. And it’s sort-of impossible for the style of that era not to rub off on you as well. As we were building the magazine, more and more things started peering out at me. The quality with which things were made in those days. I’m not just talking about clothes. It could be furniture, leather goods – quality products. So, I was approached by N. Peal, and they have this impressive history in Hollywood. There’s this lovely article they’ve sent me, where it describes Nat Peal flying to America with a soft white jumper for Marilyn Monroe.
What a ridiculously glamorous sentence.
I know. I said “You don’t make clothes quite like that anymore” and asked if we could do a collaboration. “Let’s work on this together, because I adore this stuff”. We’ve made this incredibly luxurious take on really classic staples. We’ve got a fisherman’s jumper, which are normally quite itchy and rough. Our one is 100 per cent cashmere. We’ve done this t-shirt which says “Hollywood Authentic Magazine”, a tongue-in-cheek play on Jean Seberg in Breathless, where she’s wearing the New York Herald Tribune t-shirt. There’s a cardigan with directors’ chairs and movie cameras and lights on it – it’s in beautiful cashmere, a sort of coupling of Marilyn Monroe’s big, chunky cardigan that she wears on the beach [on Santa Monica beach in 1962, photographed by George Barris] and Jeff Bridges as "The Dude". We’ve gone somewhere inbetween. It’s got pockets. Its got buttons.
Everything you could need!
They’re just beautiful pieces that you don’t see made nowadays. We have ambitions to do more of this stuff. I think this felt like a brilliant way to start – and merge the love of photography from that era with the people that we work with today. Actors today are hugely inspired by what went before. When you drill into a lot of their styles, you soon some to these classic, timeless favourites.
That saying: “fashion is transitory, style is timeless”.
Yeah, exactly. It really hasn’t dated since the 1950s.
The stars of old-school Hollywood inspired you to start off in photography. Those same names must get referenced all the time by the actors you photograph.
It’s going back to the core. And, you know what? It’s what I look for. Nearly every time I photograph a major talent, there’s someone from the past that I carry in my mind when I shoot them. I’ve always felt there was a bit of Terrance Stamp in Jude Law. There is definitely a piece of Steve McQueen in Daniel Craig. A piece of Paul Newman in Tom Hardy. Lauren Bacall in Cate Blanchett. I can’t help project a bit of that onto our stars of today.
Another one of your references are the magazines Look and Life. They covered Hollywood’s golden age with access the media can only dream of today.
Those magazines in the 1960s would have this extraordinary access to things. There was a trust between people that was built up. You earn that trust. I haven’t screwed anyone over in my 27 years of working in Hollywood.
Presumably it’s more fun if you’re Austin Butler to spend the afternoon going on a road trip with you, rather than sitting in a hotel junket being asked questions by journalists.
I think so. With Austin Butler, I started at his home in Hollywood, then we packed a bag for the day with his own clothes, and the two of us got in his two-seater car and we drove down to Anaheim, California. We went to his old school, visited his old classroom. Then we went to his old house – he hadn’t been there for 22 years. There’s an amusement park down the road from his house that his mum used to take him to. And you got these stories that as an actor and a creative, he would [mentally] go back to that era of childlike innocence, before his mum passed away, before his family had separated. All these things happen in life. But actors have to find that innocence and go back to it. I’m obsessed by how someone’s origin story affects their whole life, and their creative decisions. There’s generally some sadness. We all carry some sort of trauma. But its enabled certain people to dig particularly deep, and pull something out.
Why did you start posting your work to Instagram? Photographers used to see it as the enemy.
We stopped being able to make money by selling photos to magazines. And when that happened, I was no longer nearly as protective as others have been about the photos being on social media, and them being shared. I want my work seen. Every artist wants their work seen! And being able to publish on social media has given me a soapbox. For me, it’s wonderful to have that. Even before doing the [Hollywood Authentic] magazine, I was still getting access. I've just come back from the Venice Film Festival, and I got crazy access, just for my Instagram – access that really major magazines weren’t getting. It obviously feels wonderful to get that. But it comes with a responsibility.
I saw that. There’s a funny moment that someone's filmed where you’re walking backwards, shooting Lady Gaga, through loads of paparazzi, and she halts the whole procession to pick your glasses up off the pavement.
She knew they were mine! We’d just travelled over on the boat.
Another one that comes to mind recently is shooting Ryan Gosling up the Warner Bros. Water Tower.
That was a lot. But it was a lovely way to get to know someone, because neither of us were that cool about heights. Have you seen the video? We’re literally laughing, holding on because we’re so nervous.
I think I'm obliged to ask you what your favourite "piece" is from the collection.
The blue cardigan. [Runs off, and comes back wearing it.] Yeah. You could just see someone rocking up to Paramount Studios in 1963 wearing this thing.
You suggested as much earlier, but is this the start of a whole Hollywood Authentic range? Is there furniture to follow, perhaps?
There’s lots of things I’d love to do. I’ve been playing around with some… functional stuff. But I’ve got to concentrate on my day job, and not get too distracted by it all. I mean, I’m into everything, you know? And the idea of making really good quality products, where the theme and inspiration is Hollywood. It’s still the dream factory.
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