For years, the only roles reserved for actor Rupert Everett (United Kingdom, 67 years old) were those of the “gay best friend.” He was Julia Roberts’ in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and Madonna’s in Almost Perfect (2000). Whether typecast or not, these films were the global platform for everyone to get to know this tall Brit (almost two meters) with the look of an English lord who ended up revealing himself as one of Hollywood’s most outspoken voices. If in his three memoirs —Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins (2006), Vanished Years (2012), and To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde (2020)— he was indiscreet talking about a certain “sweaty” smell of Roberts and Madonna, but also about his addiction to sex and drugs (he even confessed to having worked as a hustler to pay for heroin), in a recent interview with The Guardian the actor admitted that in the past he was someone “shameless, arrogant, hypocritical, lethal.”
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“I was only interested in myself and my own pleasure. I think I was a bit of a sociopath. I was a terrible gossip and repeated everything I was told. I borrowed people’s clothes and never returned them,” the actor told the British newspaper in a conversation published on June 1. An attitude, he says, that he doesn’t know where it came from, that he can’t justify, and in which he no longer recognizes himself.
When asked by his interviewer if those adjectives referred to the professional sphere, Everett admits that in his youth he was “obsessed with climbing the ladder instead of doing my job,” and that he sought to cancel and interrupt the work of his co-stars for his own benefit: “In Another Country [the 1984 film he starred in alongside Colin Firth] I behaved incredibly badly. That’s another thing I can’t understand: the logic that led me to believe it was okay to do that. I still don’t understand how it happened.”
The actor confesses that he sabotaged productions “by making everyone laugh and ruining the show. Dressing up as a rabbi and sitting in the box [among the audience] in scenes I wasn’t part of.” “A little fun is fine, but I ruined things,” he tells The Guardian, and admits that he also disrespected the audience, often working while high: “I was left with the strange vestiges of an upper-class punk attitude,” he describes himself.
Everett, who after the box office failure of his film with Madonna saw how Hollywood grew tired of his role as the protagonist’s gay friend, has again referred in his latest interview to aspects of his past that, although he is not proud of, he does not try to avoid either. When asked if he was really as obsessed with sex as he described in his memoirs, the actor, who played playwright Christopher Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love (1998), answers affirmatively, describing a moment — the stage he lived as a gay person — when many people were liberated through sex. “I felt like I could destroy my past through sex. That somehow it would free you,” he says about a childhood marked by being the son of a British Army commander and attending a private Catholic school.
That relationship with sex and his own image accompanied him in his acting career: “Even the work was about flirting, really. Trying to be attractive. Which, obviously, came from the feeling of not being so. My vanity wasn’t about ‘mirror, mirror, who’s the fairest of them all?’. Vanity usually comes from deep insecurity, rather than a feeling of being fabulous.” He also talks about his physique in the interview, assuring that even when he was in better shape, he was wrong: “I never bothered to do all those things, like stretching, that were necessary for weightlifting, because tendons get tighter and tighter. I did nothing,” he recalls, and admits: “I’ve wrecked myself. Because of that, I’m now almost crippled.”
Rupert, who continues playing notable supporting roles, stars in the film Madfabulous, in which he plays the butler of the eccentric fifth Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Paget, and which will be released in UK cinemas on June 5.
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