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| ‘I feel thrilled not to be young’ … Rupert Everett at the Theatre Royal, Bath. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian |
Rupert Everett: 'I'd have done anything to be a Hollywood star'
Tuesday 30 July 2019
He lit up the screen in the 80s – but things did not go as planned. As he takes on Chekhov, Everett speaks about stardom, midlife crises and penis padding
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upert Everett is directing his first play and a few unfortunate incidents have occurred before opening night. It is David Hare’s new version of Uncle Vanya, in which Everett also stars, and all did not go as planned in its first preview. “In a fight scene I elbowed the leading actor, John Light [who plays Dr Astrov],” says Everett. “He really hurt his eye and had to go to hospital. He came back and then, leaning around the stage with his one eye, he fell off it and really hurt his leg.”
The play’s opening has been pushed back a week, until Light is back on his feet, but if this production returns Chekhov’s 1898 play to the farce that Everett says it was written to be, and not a straightforwardly bleak tale of midlife ennui and angst, then the mishap has an edge of black humour, too.
Talk about breaking a leg, I say. Yes, says Everett, and describes the strain of the unexpected on stage. “I’m in a state of collapse.”
Perhaps because he is an actor accustomed to playing arch, unflappable types, he does not look as if he is in a state of collapse. He appears equanimous and elegant, sitting in a back room of the Theatre Royal Bath, bearing the mildly aristocratic air of a gentleman farmer. Aged 60, he lives in the West Country these days, having moved in with his 85-year-old mother a few ago, together with his partner of 10 years. “I now like trees and birds. And cows. I love cows..”
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| Rehearsing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at Theatre Royal Bath with John Light. Photograph: Nobby Clark |
It wasn’t always so. In the late 70s he ran away from private school, the shires and his military family’s Catholicism to make his name in acclaimed films such as Another Country and Dance With a Stranger. He also spent years doing drugs, clubs and parties, looking incandescently beautiful alongside Hollywood types.
Life now is a far cry from all that. The ferocious beauty has mellowed into a gentler, crinklier handsomeness. He has a modesty that may reflect the lessons learned from the extreme gyrations of his career – from A-list stardom to the much-documented wilderness years.
When I ask him about directing a play for the first time, he says it has been challenging “for a flake” but , at this age, he feels lucky to be challenged. While directing is new, the stage isn’t. He learned his trade at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Three years before the film of Another Country, he starred in the play. Where is he more at home? “Because one is continually questioning oneself and what one is doing, you’re never really at home. You’re always starting at zero. I love being involved with theatre and film and with stories in general. I find each of them very challenging. Everything is a potential train crash, but that’s the nature of our business.”
Vanya, the character Everett plays, is 47 and in the grip of midlife crisis. The play grapples with the loss of youth alongside the complications of love. Does ageing bother Everett? “No, I feel thrilled not to be young. I’m older, but I haven’t got any maladies yet.”
And when you look in the mirror? “I don’t look in the mirror. Not much. I’ve spent a long time looking in the mirror … I had that gay shame when I was young. I wanted to be better looking all the time. I was always striving to look right.”
Some of it was because of his size. He grew 12 inches when he was 15. His limbs are still rangy though he swears he has shrunk a couple of inches from his once 6ft 6in(-ish) frame. Back then, he had a 19in waist and was rake-thin. “That’s why I never felt good-looking. Immediately after I started working, I found these two queens who made padding. I had a padded bum, padded legs, padded shoulders.”
Things have got better as he has aged. “I learned how to be more interesting as an actor. I learned how to write a bit. I feel very lucky that so many things came along.”
He is right about the writing. His two autobiographies showcased a genuine talent, though writing is not an easy option, he says. “An actor is a group animal and a writer is a solitary animal. For a group person to isolate themselves and have just themselves to feed off is very complicated. Sometimes it goes well, but mostly it’s a process of endless reworking and getting it wrong.”
Writing has also given him the freedom to create roles that were not being offered to him in film, he has said. He came out as gay in an era when it could kill an actor’s career, at the height of the Aids epidemic. He has said that it led to typecasting ever since, exemplified by his role as the gay friend opposite Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding.
Writing has also given him the freedom to create roles that were not being offered to him in film, he has said. He came out as gay in an era when it could kill an actor’s career, at the height of the Aids epidemic. He has said that it led to typecasting ever since, exemplified by his role as the gay friend opposite Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding.
Might he be tempted not to come out if he had his time again? “For me it wasn’t possible. There was no way I was going to pretend. I was so proud to be part of it all. The gay scene at the beginning of the Thatcher years was so remarkable because you counted just for showing up. And it was classless and ageless. You’d go to the Coleherne Arms [a former gay pub in west London] and you’d see a duke of 70 chatting to a plumber of 25 and then they’d go off to spank each other.”
Still, the dearth of acting roles is what led him to write the screenplay for The Happy Prince, a biopic of the elderly Oscar Wilde, which he also directed and starred in. It was a labour of love for Everett, who worked on it for over a decade, and it should have won the Oscars it was predicted to scoop. He has starred as Wilde on stage, too, in a revival of Hare’s The Judas Kiss, for which he brought back the padding of his youth. “I always imagined Wilde was revoltingly well hung. So I wore a padded cock and the front five rows, I could see, were thinking, ‘My God, I had no idea Rupert Everett was so well hung!’ I had go down a few sizes because it was taking over.” That was four years ago in the West End. “Maybe I should put it back in for Vanya!”
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| Padded … as Oscar Wilde with Freddie Fox in The Judas Kiss by David Hare in 2013. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian |
The writing also became more necessary because of the growth of ageism, as he sees it, which means even male actors now must present eternal youth on screen. Men he says, had it very easy for a long time. “You could be a man aged 73 and have a 22-year-old girlfriend. That’s all changed. The result for us is that we haven’t got roles going off into the grey distance.”
The prospects for gay actors have changed in Hollywood, he thinks, but only because the industry has been forced to accept it. Ironically, he has observed the erosion of gay rights in the real world. “It seems to me that there’s no ‘live and let live’ any more,” he says. “Last year I was opening my film in Italy, and you’d go to a place like Genoa, where the state withdrew funding for its gay pride march, and there would be other horrible things you’d hear, about families who’d locked up their lesbian daughter …”
The world is changing in a way that gives him another reason to be happy about ageing. He is particularly despairing of British politics. “The end of it was Ann Widdecombe’s speech in Brussels. The most alarming, repulsive, depressing, shaming thing that I’ve ever seen. More shaming than Nigel Farage somehow, right down to the old cockney rolling of the Rs,” he says, and demonstrates the sound.
Despair is a central theme of Chekhov’s play; Vanya’s midlife crisis is filled with disappointment as he reflects on the past. I wonder about Everett’s midlife audit. There is regret at losing friends, he says, but he won’t be drawn on his famous falling-out with Madonna. “I think people who say they have no regrets are a bit wacky. There are so many things to regret. The way one treats people; the way one writes off relationships; the way one, looking back, backstabs. Middle age is a reckoning. You need nerves of steel to get through it.”
There is disappointment, too. The reality of his life did not – and perhaps could not – meet the totality of his ambitions as a young man. “I wanted to be that big Hollywood movie star as a kid. I was so blindly ambitious that I would have done anything to get along. I mean, I wouldn’t have killed ...”
But doesn’t he see through that kind of fame now? “Yes, but still … I think everybody’s disappointed. Everybody wants to have more.”
So what is the ambition now? He is working on another autobiography about the 10 years it took to make his Wilde film. He has also written the screenplay for a film about Paris in the 1970s, which he is trying to get financed, and a TV series about a boyband. He swings between doubt, despair and hope as he lists the projects. “I don’t know if I can write any more,” he says in one breath, and then in the next: “I’ve got tons of things I’d like to try and do.”
“Of course,” he says, “you’ve got to know the time to stop trying so hard. But I’d love to direct another film. I would love to write for TV. I’m keeping going. The ambition is still blind. That’s the weird thing.”
• Uncle Vanya is at Theatre Royal Bath until 3 August.
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