His first memoir was full of scurrilous anecdotes. Now he’s written an equally entertaining new book, The American No. The actor talks to Deborah Ross about Botox, sex and celebrity bust-ups.
Rupert Everett is lately married, which is a worry. What if this new-found respectability means he’s no fun any more? Who is fun any more once it’s all about knowing which day is bin day? “I do know that,” he says. “Friday.” But even though he insists that there is, indeed, a new Rupert on the block who would “rather try to be nice than mouth off or say something opinionated”, he fails deliciously, which is a relief.
The old Rupert will have his say, and the old Rupert is still wonderfully mischievous and funny and off-message and bitchy. (“I can’t get over the fact Tom Cruise has no earlobes… I always look at that rather than watch him.”) There’s top gossip too. When, for instance, we discuss our teenage crushes on David Essex, he says Sir John Gielgud was also mad for him. Sir John Gielgud was mad for David Essex? “It was his famous thing,” he says. “He loved him.” We certainly haven’t fully lost him to bin day yet. When I ask if he can cook, he says, “No.” Can’t or won’t? “Won’t.” That’s the ticket.
We meet in a London hotel where one hour becomes two and then three and it seems like no time at all. Topics covered include how he met his husband (“I smouldered at him in the gym”), whether he finds Marlon Brando or Paul Newman sexier (Brando), his former promiscuity (”I was upended by half of London by the time I was 17″) and who makes him most jealous professionally. “Everyone.” Could you be more specific? Hugh Grant, he says, in Paddington 2 was hard to stomach. Because you’d have loved to do the prison dance? “I adore Hugh… but I’d have loved to do the prison dance.”
As he’s quite preoccupied with his own mortality, we even get on to the best way to die. I say a television light entertainment death like Tommy Cooper or Eric Morecambe where, bang, the light goes out mid-performance, would be ideal, surely. He is not convinced. “I’m not doing that in the middle of a scene,” he says. “I’m not doing my last shit on stage.” He says what would be ideal is if, after leaving here, he’s walking down the street and someone comes up from behind and shoots him in the back of the head. That would be the best way to go, “And you could film it on your phone.” I say I’d like to think I’d do CPR first but, on reflection, that does sound like a plan.
He is 65, still handsome. He has had his run-ins with Botox but now desists. “Once you start there is no end to it. You get this smooth forehead but everything else looks weird under it.” Like residents’ parking? You do one road then, because of the knock-on effect, you have to do the next and the next and the next? “Exactly like that.” He has tried fillers but, he says, you see these jowls? The fillers “dropped”, he explains, so that’s what they’re about. “And there is nothing worse in cinema than jowls.” He would have a facelift but, “I don’t want to have the operation and I don’t want the anaesthetic.” Also, presumably, you don’t want to end up looking like, for example, Mickey Rourke. That wasn’t a facelift, to be clear. That was “the silicone lips he put in which he couldn’t then take out”. Sharon Osbourne, meanwhile, “doesn’t look good… She looks insane.”
He says he has toyed with the idea of Ozempic or similar as “I have a big tummy”. He wanted to wear a tracksuit to his wedding at Camden register office “because none of my suits fit me any more. But I wasn’t allowed. So I wore a suit with my tummy pulled in but also overflowing.” He’s not keen on the Ozempic look though. “Did you see Robbie Williams in that documentary where he wore his underwear? He just looked very weird. Everyone on Ozempic, their necks look weird.”
What do you think now when you catch your own reflection? “I only look in the mirror when I shave and that’s it. I don’t like looking at myself any more. I used to love it.” I say Joan Collins once said that to be beautiful is like being born rich and having to get poorer and poorer. “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good.”
He is an actor, writer and director, combining all three roles in The Happy Prince (2018), his film about Oscar Wilde in later life. What were you like to direct? “I loved directing myself. I was very organised, very on time.” A delight? “A delight.” He is sad the film didn’t do better business “but everything was against us, including a very hot summer. You always hope to make a move with a job, and I wanted to carry on making my own films and I didn’t make that move. It didn’t make it easier, the film not being a success.” He can be melancholic. I try to buck him up. I tell him that Martin Scorsese’s biggest box-office flop, The King of Comedy, is in my opinion his masterpiece and The Happy Prince is your masterpiece, the finest thing you’ve ever done, and it was, let’s remember, a critical smash. “I am very proud of it,” he says, cheered.
The acting is still going great guns. He has a part in Emily in Paris as an Italian designer with some nice scarves (“I love it”) and is currently filming Madfabulous, a film about the 19th-century Marquess of Anglesey, “who was a cross-dresser and spent something like £70 million in modern money on staging shows in his converted chapel”. He plays the butler and thinks he’s now what he should always have been, which is a character actor. He does not miss being a leading man. Quite the opposite. “Letting go of having to be mesmerising,” he says, “is such a relief.”
But it may be he is primarily a writer. His first memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, is the most truthful, witty and beautifully written celebrity memoir you will ever read. This is the book that told us Julia Roberts smells “vaguely of sweat” and Madonna is “a whiny old barmaid” (she never talked to him again), although my favourite, I tell him, is when he said Hughie Green had “the cheery bedside manner of a killer gynaecologist”. It’s perfection. “Did I say that? How clever. It’s amazing that I said that.” What’s your own favourite? “I can’t remember any of them now… That Piers Morgan is hung like a budgie? That made me laugh.”
Have you ever upset someone so much that when you see them on the opposite side of the room you have to bolt? “I wrote about Natasha Richardson’s funeral and I don’t think Vanessa Redgrave has ever forgiven me for that.” Are you, do you think, a publicist’s nightmare? Do they look down their list of upcoming projects and go, “Oh no, it’s Rupert Everett.” He says he understands what the game is. “If you’re on a big movie, you can’t afford to go off piste at all. They’re very easily put out.” But he’s been bad at playing it. He wishes it weren’t so, “then people would take me more seriously”.
He looks glum again. I say he puts me in mind of old-schoolers like Richard Harris or Robert Stephens or Peter O’Toole who could not be tamed, said what they pleased and it didn’t distract from their talent. He is also cheered by that.
But back to the writing and his latest book, The American No, a collection of the films he has pitched that never got taken up and the scripts he has written that were never made and the stories that go with them. So much never sees the light of day. “Edmund Kean,” he says, “said showbusiness is not for people who bleed easily.” The book is a fascinating read. He recounts meeting John Schlesinger when Schlesinger was due to direct Rupert and Madonna — at a time when they were still speaking — in The Next Best Thing in 2000. The film opens with a funeral scene that Rupert considered dull, so he had the idea that his character could be late to arrive as he’d followed the wrong coffin, as once happened to him. (A long story that is recounted in all its full glory in the book.) Schlesinger, whose favourite drug, poppers, was also Rupert’s, was not persuaded.
The film was a major flop that put Rupert out in the cold for years. Whether an improved funeral scene would have saved it, we’ll never know. (His other idea was for Schlesinger himself to turn up as a mourner dressed as a “leather queen” and “wheel a giant wreath uphill”.) Would you watch The Next Best Thing now if it came on the telly? “God, no,” he says. “It would bring me out in shingles.”
What is an “American no” exactly? This, he explains, is what happens when you meet Hollywood producers and they love your idea and they adore your script and it’s going to be fantastic and they can’t wait to work with you and then you never hear from them again. His latest “American no”, you could say, was from Ridley Scott, who directed him in Napoleon, where he played the Duke of Wellington. I say I found that film confusing. Why was Napoleon suddenly firing at pyramids? He says it was far too hurried. “I thought it was a shame it wasn’t a TV series. It’s the kind of story that does beg for 12 hours of television.” But you tapped up Scott for a part in Gladiator II? He did, he says. “I rang him up and said, ‘Please, Ridley, can I be in Gladiator?” and he said, ‘OK, I’ll see what I can do.’ And then nothing happened.” But all is not lost. “He’s doing another film and I’m hoping to get into that.”
He and his husband, Henrique, an accountant, live between two places now. They have their wonderful-sounding Holborn flat — “It’s in an 18th-century house and it’s gorgeous” — and while their neighbourhood used to be rather seedy, “A Waitrose came to the Brunswick Centre, which completely changed everything in a matter of months.” But mostly they live in Wiltshire with his mother. What day is bin day there? “Thursday.”
The arrangement makes sense. “After my dad died, I came back to England [from America] and she wanted to stay where she was living [in the Queen Anne house that has been the family home since Everett was a teenager] but couldn’t figure it out financially. So we moved in but not together. We divided it. She lives in one bit and I live in the other. This way, you can keep things going and make sure everything is all right. She’s got dementia. She doesn’t move very much. We have lunch every day. But it’s worked out really well. She has a carer and it hasn’t worried her at all to lose her memory. She just watches television all day long. She had a fall a couple of years ago that set her back and that’s it — she just sits there.” She knows who you are? “Yes, but she can’t remember the names of new people, weirdly.”
Have you ever felt anger towards her? Given you were dispatched to boarding school at seven years old, which you have said was the worst, most painful thing that ever happened to you… “It was a very big moment, being sent away to school, leaving my mother, but I never felt angry as it’s what everyone else did. I did start disliking my parents later for very horrible reasons. I didn’t think they were grand enough at one point. My world view was spend, spend, spend and theirs was much more careful and I thought they were very dull. I really disliked them between the ages of 16 and 22 but, of course, looking back, I also loved them.”
His father, Anthony, was an army major who later became a stockbroker while his mother, Sara, was the daughter of a vice-admiral. Rupert had an older brother and also a sister who died — he doesn’t know if it was a stillbirth or miscarriage or what. Was it ever talked about? “No. I don’t remember how I found out. It must have come up at some point.” But your mother never said anything? “No, but I think I was the girl she wanted. I was certainly very girlie and she treated me as a girl and I wore girlie clothes.” Did your sister ever have a name? “Rupert!”
From the word go, he says, he felt comfortable with women and found the men in his family “very frightening”. How so? “They were so Empire-ish and frosty and withering. I hated all the butch things. We would go sailing a lot and I always hated sailing and much preferred being in the kitchen with the women licking the icing and that kind of stuff.”
When he was about 13 or 14, his father told him he was having an affair. “He told me when he was drunk and as I got older I started watching him and could see he loved ladies. All my girl friends he’d call ‘little girl’ and things like that.” Did you mind keeping that secret from your mother? “I did. I felt very bad for my mother. I wasn’t keen on my dad when I was a child but I loved my mother. I slept with her until quite late, until I was 14 or 15, wiggling toes.” Crikey. Doesn’t that now strike you as odd? “I was very insecure and when I came home in the holidays I just gravitated to her bed.” Where was your father? “They slept in separate bedrooms.”
Perhaps his mother knew about his father’s infidelity but that generation of women put up and shut up? “She came from a military background and I think they were trained not to ask questions about things. Even if they did have misgivings about something they’d keep it to themselves. We have a few battleaxes left and I admire them more and more. The reticence and formality I hated when I was young I now find quite appealing. What’s happened to us? The emotionalism we have now developed… It’s our main currency, being able to feel things. Everyone is bursting into tears at the drop of a hat and it’s not very helpful. I find it quite appalling. I blame Freud.”
Your mother would have been perfect for Strictly, say? Would have put up and shut up about the punishing regime? “She’d have been great on Strictly.”
Rupert was asked on the Italian version of Strictly once and even though “they really pay well” he refused. “I don’t know how they finish the dance and then run up that staircase. I’d have a heart attack.” He then asks if the show has had to come off the air. No, I tell him. Do you watch telly? “I tried to turn it on the other day and couldn’t figure out how… It’s never been my strong suit but I’d forgotten how to do it.”
He cottoned on to sex early. When he was little, he remembers, his nanny took him for a walk and secretly met her boyfriend, and he witnessed them snogging and registered it as “pretty exciting”. Then there was the time he was banned from the local woods because, his mother told him, there was a man who did things to children hanging out there, so of course he spent all his time in the woods and was disappointed when nothing transpired.
At school he and the other boys would “rub bottoms”, which he then had to confess to a priest. (Both his prep and senior school — Farleigh in Andover, then Ampleforth — were Catholic.) He would confess to having been “vulgar”. When he was 16 it was agreed that he should leave Ampleforth. He was a hopeless pupil. “I was a terrible show-off and spent my whole time disrupting and never learning anything, which I regret a lot. I had to learn everything afterwards.” He says he’d been a quiet boy who liked to sit in cupboards before being sent away and showing off was his coping mechanism. How did it help? “It’s like being camp. It’s a way of covering up.”
He came to London, initially to a crammer, and went sex crazy. When you look back, do you admire your fearlessness? “No. I was stupid. I can’t really understand it and don’t admire it… I thought sex was my liberation from a military middle-class background, but it was fraught with danger, not only from Aids. I used to go to the Coleherne [a gay pub in west London] and there were serial killers left, right and centre there [Dennis Nilsen, Michael Lupo and Colin Ireland were regulars]. I was walking on razors without knowing it. I can’t really relate to myself as a young person any more.”
Did it become depressing? “No. It was really fun and thrilling. I was so into gay sex I didn’t mind who I had it with. I wasn’t one of those people who just wanted to meet good-looking people. I wanted to meet anybody. It felt so new and fresh and rebellious. And Hampstead Heath in the summer in those days was like being in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” You didn’t get “queer bashed”? “No, but you did have your keys in your hand and were ready for anything. That was part of the excitement of it all. When you got further into the heath and you saw the lights of cigarettes like clusters of stars and you made for them, it was magical.”
Yet, I tell him, I’m confused. Early on, you dated a succession of beautiful women: Bianca Jagger, Susan Sarandon, Paula Yates, Béatrice Dalle. As a gay man, how did that work? “With varying degrees of success,” he says. It was, he continues, all about yearning to belong. This was a time when homosexuality was legal, but only just, and it still felt illicit and made you feel like an outsider. But walk into a restaurant with a woman on your arm and the world was yours. He remembers that when he was with Paula Yates, the actor Gordon Jackson invited them out to dinner because, thinking they were about to get married, he wanted to give them advice on mortgages, and Rupert felt such a sense of belonging he “surged with happiness”. He can’t say to what extent these relationships were successful. “You’d have to ask them and some of them are dead. I was a pretty slippery fish, so possibly more fun for me than them.”
He’s been with Henrique for 14 years. So what exactly happened in the gym? “It took a long time of being nearby and the smouldering looks you are not allowed to do any more, because people would find it upsetting. I’m quite blind, so my smouldering looks tend to be overdone. It took at least two years of smouldering looks. He required a lot of persuading.”
You once said you despised marriage, so what changed your mind? “Only dying, really. Just in terms of what might happen in the future and hospitals and the financial side and all that. That’s the main reason, but not in a jaded way. I adore my husband. We just felt we should make things secure.” Did you ever want children? “No, no, no. I’m so lucky not to have children. Apart from anything else, it never ends. You’re saddled with them for ever and what if you don’t like them? Then they do all the things you did and I’d be living in terror.” Does your mother know you are married? “I tell her but she forgets immediately, which is quite sad.”
That’s the main thrust of our conversation but there was so much more besides. I ask about his favourite books and writers. He lists: “Travels with My Aunt, Nancy Mitford, The Catcher in the Rye. I adore JR Ackerley. The Great Gatsby.” (He is currently writing a novel “that’s a modern Great Gatsby starring a Russian oligarch”.) We talk about his unlikely friendship with Katie Price (“A great girl”), who once bought him a “willy grooming set” as a gift, with “a little comb for pubes”. We wonder why there are no flashers any more — “Flashing is so over” — and recall Seventies restaurant food. Melon boat — where did that sail to? “And grapefruit as a starter — wasn’t that weird?” And you’d pick Brando over Newman, seriously? When Newman may be the most exquisite man ever? “I don’t think he’d be much fun to have sex with.” Because Joanne would storm in? “Because Joanne would storm in and because there is something about those pale blue eyes. Kind of flat, slightly blank.” And what would you choose, if you could: a knighthood or an Oscar? “A knighthood. Sir Rupert Everett. No, an Oscar. Couldn’t I have both? And a Légion d’honneur from France would also be nice.”
Finally, I ask if he had a wedding list. He says no. “It was a quiet wedding — only us and a couple of witnesses. I don’t think we got any presents.” But I could buy you a toaster maybe? “Our toaster is not working, so that would be a wonderful addition,” he says. He does seem genuinely excited. We haven’t lost him fully to the bins yet, but we could be in dangerous waters.
The American No by Rupert Everet is on sale now.
Written by: Deborah Ross
© The Times of London