Interview

Rupert Everett: the queen of mean

Rupert Everett's new memoir has landed him in hot water. Again. But he thinks we just need to lighten up

Decca Aitkenhead

Friday 28 September 2012

P

oor old Rupert Everett thought he'd taken every care to say nothing in his first memoir that could upset his friend Madonna. Then the book came out, she threw a strop and stopped talking to him. His new memoir is less scandalously gossipy, so further fallings-out had looked unlikely – but before its release this week, he was already in hot water again. Everett can't understand it. "What's happened to humour? We're becoming American. Everyone gets so angry over everything."

But I'm not sure how much he really cares, and to my mind you'd have to be even more humourless than Madonna to hold anything against him. After reading Vanished Years, I didn't just want to buy the book but kidnap its author and gallivant about town with him for ever.

Not so much a kiss-and-tell as a love letter from Everett to a lost past, the book is nostalgic for a world in which big stars were big characters. He's a dreadful snob, really, but of the most adventurous kind, drawn to life's underbelly and in thrall to extremes, but bored to death by mediocrity. Now 53, still handsome but no longer the shocking beauty of his youth, Everett writes with a rare blend of wistful lament, comic observation and opinionated mischief – and in person turns out to be exactly the same.Vanished Years opens with Everett's account of his ill-fated appearance on Comic Relief Does The Apprentice, to which he'd agreed having never actually seen the show. Appalled to find himself on a testosterone-crazed team led by Piers Morgan, and overseen by a man he mistakes for Sid Jamesbut who turns out to be Sir Alan Sugar, Everett has a panic attack, bolts out of an emergency exit and legs it to the Ritz. Pursued by the production crew, he ends up cycling to King's Cross and escaping on a train to Norfolk. I'm not sure he's fully recovered yet.

"Seeing Morgan and Alastair [Campbell] and Ross Kemp was like a flashback to me of exactly why I peeled off from the mainstream in life so very early. Just feeling outside from groups of rugger-buggers at school; they just set off a kind of alarm bell in me. To me, Piers Morgan was a person who just reminded me, exactly, of all the people I was terrified of at school. I don't like how he is; I've seen him on a few other Apprentice-like things and he takes it too seriously. He's a killer. He's pathological."But, at the same time," Everett reflects, suddenly looking quite impressed, "I think how he's moulded himself into a new career – well, I love people managing to achieve things. I think it's quite clever. Also, he reminds me of Oscar Wilde, in a way. He could play Oscar Wilde if you put him in a long wig – he's so kind of slobby and elephantine. But I can't imagine him with poor Celia Walden [Morgan's wife]. She's gorgeous and very funny. I mean, she deserves to be fucked by a god."

Maybe she feels that's what she's getting? Everett considers this possibility doubtfully. "Maybe he is. I've always imagined him to be hung like a budgie underneath it all." He ponders the matter further. "Or maybe the penetrative act is not what turns her on. Anyway," he brightens, "it only makes it more riveting to me. I mean, the Celia factor does make it fascinating. I love his wife. So now that I love his wife, I'm rather confused about him. Because she's so chic-looking and he dresses like a school slob."

I tell him Morgan now has a personal trainer on each coast of the US, and that last time we met he made me touch his tricep so I could feel the results. Everett's face lights up and he leans in, enthralled. "Ree-aa-lly?"

It's this ambivalence about whether he's one of them or one of us that makes Everett such a divine chronicler of celebrity. "It's good to write things down, because I think everyone kind of colludes in misrepresenting show business quite often – from your side and our side. We both ask each other and answer each other the wrong questions, always. And the bullshit gets wiped back and forth. It's so boring. So we all collude in misrepresenting the nuts and bolts of a rather interesting world."Or at least, a world that used to be rather interesting. "I'm very romantic about the past, really. So I think it's also a middle-aged book. I guess middle age is, well, probably every generation feels the world is ending, slightly, at that age – and it is. I guess every generation is kind of ending. But New York has really changed. I mean it really has changed, so it isn't just a middle-age whine – the old New York of the 70s really doesn't exist. Everywhere is the same place now; everything's been made into a Disney Street. If you look at books of Hollywood homes in the 70s, it's just amazing how humble they are; they're like little beach shanty houses with bric-a-brac furniture. Now, the smallest fucking brainless Hollywood producer lives in an Earth Wind & Fire Egyptian palace. It's just… It's become so tasteless, I suppose."

Everett is comically glum about the sanitisation of show business – the military schedules of early nights and abstinence enforced by po-faced publicists, and all the "hollow, vulnerable" parties that make him long for Studio 54's carnival of freaks. But then again, he's become uncharacteristically abstinent himself; a few years ago he noticed his libido had vanished, and he stopped taking drugs once the thought had occurred, "Oh God, I'd hate to have a stroke doing a line of coke." So it's not always clear if he's mourning a world that has passed, or the passing of his own gilded youth.

 Rupert Everett and heiress Sabrina Guinness in 1982. Photograph: Rex

He was only 21 when his role in Another Country launched him into a turbulent career of heady triumphs and disasters. He'd more or less run away from his Catholic boarding school in his teens, to train at drama school in London, making ends meet by working on the side as a rent boy until general insubordination got him kicked out. Another Country propelled him to Hollywood, and the auspices of Orson Welles, but after success with Dance With A Stranger, his early promise began to unravel. Following some forgettable films and a bizarre stab at pop stardom, Everett ended up making TV in Russia, lolled around Europe, wrote a couple of novels, did some modelling and gradually inched his way back into Hollywood's gaze with comic turns in The Madness Of King George and Pret-A-Porter. In 1997, he starred alongside Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding and was suddenly red hot again, charming everyone with Shakespeare In Love and An Ideal Husband – until an over-hyped 1999 comedy co-starring Madonna, The Next Best Thing, bombed so badly that both their Hollywood careers were over for good.Since then, Everett has rebuilt a reputation as an unpredictable but inspired elder statesman of the theatre, and in 2006 surprised everyone again with his recklessly indiscreet memoir, Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins. No one writes about failure more delightfully than Everett. The only downside to it all has been having to experience it.

"Oh, it's horrible," he says. "You've been lulled into being somebody very important in a business – and our business is all about status – so every idea you have when it's going well, everyone says, 'That is a great idea, Rupert, we've got to go and have a meeting about that.' You think it's because it's the most fantastic idea, but you have the same idea the next year and no one listens. So it's a character destruction. You have to die – it's dying. The disaster is holding on. You keep acting in the way that you were to those people to whom you are no longer who you were, and they go, "You're not that person any more.' And that's when you become really vile. That's what normally happens."

Everett has always blamed all his false starts and failures on Hollywood's prejudice against an openly gay leading man. Any suggestion that self-sabotage might have played a part, too, has made him terribly indignant in the past, but today, when I observe that at the very height of his My Best Friend's Wedding renaissance, he scandalised America by telling a tabloid about his days as a rent boy, he just lets out a guilty little laugh. "Did I? Oh."

By his own admission, he behaved appallingly towards the director of Dance With A Stranger when he was still far too young to have seriously expected to get away with it. And how could he have thought Madonna wouldn't mind being called a "whiny old barmaid" who played with her boyfriend's penis in public? For all the white heat of Everett's ambition, I'm not convinced he ever truly wanted the success he thought he craved.

"That's weird, because I'm playing Oscar Wilde at the moment [in The Judas Kiss], and people say about him that he sabotaged himself. And I don't know that you realise, yourself. I mean, obviously it's true, but whether it's just from being a silly fairy or from really, inside, wanting to sabotage things, I don't know." Which does he think it is in his case? "Both, probably."

He thinks Aids had a lot to do with some of his early diva-ish misbehaviour. "Having been such a slag and a slut in the 1970s, then Aids came along and I spent six years in sheer terror." A mosquito bite on set one day was enough to plunge him into meltdown, when he mistook the red mark for a lesion. "That was part of my landscape then, this terror that was always there. Nearly everyone I slept with was dying, you couldn't test until about 1986, and that was really the big period of my life. That's what all queens went through who'd been in those days beforehand, when everyone fucked everyone just as a matter of course, so I think that's what started everything off for me in a kind of weird, skewed way. Because terror makes you behave very strangely. People have forgotten about that. It was absolute terror. So living like that, if something niggled you, you could explode and be really difficult."I ask if he's ever had therapy and he looks appalled. "No!" He has been to a hypnotherapist, though – "To get me to go to work with a more cheerful attitude" – and to his amazement it worked. He thinks he'll probably need to see her again, though. "Mmm. Old habits die hard."

These days, he's a brilliantly funny observer of celebrity tantrums – "screaming and throwing things and torturing assistants and complaining about the schedule of their next movie to various vassals in offices still open on the coast" – so I tell him I can't understand how he can write like that and still be capable of behaving like that. "Oh, because you behave like a diva when you get tired. For example, last week I was really nasty to the lady in the wardrobe of my new play about putting on my new wig – I was horrible to her. Well, I just was horrible, because I was incredibly nervous and this lovely lady who doesn't normally put on wigs was very nervous, and I was unsure. I loathed the wig, and result: sheer tsunami of divadom."

And in that moment it feels entirely justified? "Oh, absolutely, yeah. Female circumcision was about to happen." And afterwards, how does he feel? "Awful. Terrible." Yet never so bad that it won't happen again? He offers a carelessly elegant little mea culpa shrug. "But things happen, don't they?" He chuckles, then sighs. "Things happen."

His problem, he thinks, might be that he grew up in the 1970s with a misleading impression of what stardom would entail and demand. "That was when stars like Elizabeth Taylor said exactly what they thought, and my notion of being a star was that there was only one way it was valuable, and that's if you are yourself. Not these mirages – these ghost figures, untouchable, who don't allow themselves to be anything." I wonder if he thinks he might also have been just a bit too clever. "For acting? Oh, yeah. I'm much too intelligent. The best thing to be is bovine in acting – it looks best on screen. Yes, I think being bovine is definitely a plus. Because then, if you just go, 'Moo', everyone goes, 'Oh my God, that guy has got so much hidden depth' because they can put anything they want into the moo."

 Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde and Freddie Fox as Bosie in The Judas Kiss, London, 2012

In many ways Everett must be the closest approximation we're ever likely to see of a 21st-century Oscar Wilde. He is capable of sincere appreciation of almost any activity, if skilfully executed; tabloid trickery is "genius", advertising is "genius", and when I point out that the Third Reich could also be described as genius, he looks pleasantly surprised. "That's the kind of thing I would say." But he's equally sincere about the charitable causes he's supported and gets worked up about everything from global poverty to the law that requires Jamaicans to get visas before they can visit Britain. "Just because, what, maybe some dealers are going to come over? We need dealers, to be quite honest. It's the English who want the drugs. It's so unfair." He adores the traditional high Tory old-fashioned values of stoicism and honour, while extolling a languid sort of affectless libertarianism – "People can do whatever they like, as far as I'm concerned" – and finds everything either wildly funny or deeply serious, sometimes simultaneously. Around his neck hangs a gigantic, diamond-encrusted crucifix, but his last words before we part are a baroque rant against churches.

"Why do queens want to go and get married in churches? Obviously this crusty old pathetic, Anglican church – the most joke-ish church of all jokey churches – of course they don't want to have queens getting married. It's kind of understandable that they don't; they're crusty old calcified freaks. But why do we want to get married in churches? I don't understand that, myself, personally. 

I loathe heterosexual weddings; I would never go to a wedding in my life. I loathe the flowers, I loathe the fucking wedding dress, the little bridal tiara. It's grotesque. It's just hideous. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster."

So I wasn't entirely surprised when, just a few days later, he landed himself in trouble. It was a throwaway remark to a Sunday supplement – "I can't think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads" – and within hours the world's media was buzzing with letters from angry gay dads calling Everett a dinosaur. Like every other ding-dong to have ever come his way, it seems to have taken him by surprise, because he calls and invites me to lunch to explain what he meant.

"For me, being gay was about wanting to do the opposite of the straight world, so I think that's where my problems in this particular area come from. For me, personally, the last thing I would like in the entire world would be to go through cocktailing my sperm with my boyfriend and finding some grim couple in Ohio who are gluten-free and who you pay $75,000 to have your baby. To me it feels absolutely hideous. But that's me, just me. I'm not having a go at gay couples who do. I think if Elton and David want to have babies, that's wonderful. I think we should all do what we want.

"Isn't there a middle way, where you can just say, 'Not for me, but it doesn't matter'? But no, everything's sort of turned into al-Qaida. I'm sure I'm going to be nail-bombed. David Furnish is probably going to send Patrick Cox with a bomb and blow up the theatre." Beneath the expression of pained innocence, he looks rather thrilled.

• Vanished Years, by Rupert Everett, is published by Little, Brown at £20.

THE GUARDIAN