Rupert Everett is struggling with the heatwave. It takes him back to the summer of 1976, when he was 17, lying in the sun, calm as a sloth, with his whole future ahead of him. Things are very different now. “When you were young, hot weather was nice. But when you’re chubby like me now, it’s not so nice,” he says.
“You’re not chubby,” his publicist says, with cheerful reassurance.
“I am chubby,” Everett insists, in his breathy, upper-class drawl.
Well, none of us are as thin as we used to be, I jump in, and you were probably too skinny back then.
Everett gives me a magnificent look that says, how dare you. “No, I wasn’t. I looked wonderful at one point. I had muscles. Everything.” He’s talking about his golden era in movies, when he was a big box-office draw. “It was quite short-lived. I call it my Hollywood year.” He chuckles. Everett has a wonderful chuckle—a barely audible hum. A slight rise in tone here, a little emphasis there, and you realize he’s amused. Sometimes, he just bursts out laughing.
The period he’s talking about began in 1997, with his comeback as Julia Roberts’ gay best friend in My Best Friend’s Wedding. For a while, he became the dream accessory for Hollywood’s leading ladies—a charismatic, campy bestie. There was plenty of well-paid work, but he was stuck in typecasting hell. Everett faced a triple whammy: he was gay, posh, and inconveniently tall at 6ft 4in. (“If you have to lean down for a kissing scene, you look like a freak,” he says.) It was never going to be easy to get leading man roles. And that’s exactly how it turned out.
His first taste of success came 16 years earlier with Another Country, the Julian Mitchell play set in a private school ruled by the three Bs: bullying, bigotry, and buggery.
Everett went on to star in the film adaptation, perfectly cast as the horny, anarchic rebel Guy Bennett (based on future spy Guy Burgess), because he had pretty much been that boy. The son of a British army major who became a successful stockbroker, Everett grew up in Norfolk and Essex, attended the Catholic private school Ampleforth in Yorkshire, and was later expelled from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama for insubordination.
The public didn’t realize how badly he’d behaved until he published a couple of brilliantly written, tell-all memoirs: Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins in 2006, and Vanished Years in 2012. He treated us to sharp little stories of himself dabbling in heroin, more than dabbling in cocaine, selling himself for sex when times were tough, seemingly determined to destroy every opportunity and betray every friendship that came his way.
Nobody was spared in the memoirs, least of all his A-list friends. He said Madonna and Julia Roberts smelled “vaguely of sweat,” which he found a turn-on. Roberts was “beautiful and tinged with madness,” and when stressed, Madonna “had power cuts and the old whiny barmaid came screaming out of the defrosting cold room.” (She didn’t speak to him for a long time after that was published.) His pen portraits were as sharp and outrageous as they were keenly observed. Describing his brief appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice for Comic Relief (he walked out on the first day), he said Alastair Campbell had “a big knobbly nose that was made for aggression or at least cunnilingus” and Alan Sugar had “that blunt insolence peculiar to all barrow-boy billionaires.” Everett established himself as a modern-day Hedda Hopper—a ruthlessly indiscreet gossip.
His ruthlessness extended to self-criticism. He called himself “a terrible monster,” “impossible,” and “a cunt.” And this, along with the weather, is what he’s struggling with today. He says he simply cannot begin to understand the man he used to be.
Describe him, I say. “B”Rash. Pushy. Disingenuous. Lethal.” Whoa, hold on—there’s a lot to unpack there. Pushy when it comes to your career, I assume? “Yes, obsessed. But not in the right way. I was just obsessed with getting ahead, not with actually doing my job.”
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In The Vortex in 1989. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Alamy
In fact, he says back then he did everything he could to avoid doing his job. He was always trying to get out of shows or mess them up, right from the start. “In Another Country, I behaved terribly. That’s another thing I can’t understand—how I could feel justified in doing that. I still can’t quite figure out how it happened.” How did he behave badly? “Making everyone laugh and ruining the show. Dressing up as a rabbi and sitting in the audience box during scenes I wasn’t in.” He lets out a hum-like laugh, but he sounds genuinely horrified by what he did. The playwright, Julian Mitchell, came to see Another Country one day when Everett had set up a nasty prank: “Sugar cubes that turned into flies during a tea party scene.” The actor who found the flies in his tea screamed mid-show. “A little bit of fun is okay, but I would ruin things.”
And he kept it up, behaving appallingly in show after show. When he was in Noël Coward’s The Vortex, an audience member wrote to him saying he spoke too quietly. He apologized profusely and sent him a clipping of his pubic hair as compensation. That doesn’t bother him much today. What does bother him is his lack of respect for the audience while he was performing. So often he was high on drugs, wishing he was somewhere else.
“I had the weird remnants of a punk upper-class attitude,” he says. What does he mean? “Fuck everything. Fuck everything.” How was that different from, say, a working-class punk attitude? He smiles. “Well, punk wasn’t really an upper-class movement. Heroin is more the upper-class version of punk, which was the complete opposite.” He mimes falling asleep mid-conversation. “Setting yourself on fire with a cigarette—that was the upper-class version of punk.”
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‘I always felt I was missing out on some mythical life that was taking place somewhere else’ … Everett. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
We’re at a café in Bloomsbury, London’s literary quarter, close to where he has a flat. Everett, who has just turned 67, is still handsome and big, with a great head of hair. But he looks his age. Those sharp cheekbones from before are gone. He used to be too good-looking to play character roles, which he says he always wanted to do. Now he’s perfect for them. These days, he can’t be bothered with the gym, or yoga or Pilates, even though he knows they might help him live longer. He enjoys walking his Labrador, and that’s as far as his exercise goes.
Even when he got buff as a bodybuilder in Hollywood, he says, he didn’t do it properly. “I ruined myself. Now I’m almost crippled because of it. I could never be bothered to do all those things, like stretching, which are necessary for lifting weights, because your tendons get tighter and tighter. So boring. I didn’t do any of that. So now I think my downfall will be musculoskeletal.”
Everett is incredibly polite. Even when he goes to the bathroom, he asks if I mind and apologizes for the rudeness. Occasionally, a more assertive side comes out. “Would you like a bacon sandwich?” he barks out of nowhere, with such enthusiasm it sounds more like a command than an offer. He seems to belong to a different era. There are so many reasons not to ask a stranger if they want a bacon butty—from vegetarianism to religion—none of which seem to have crossed his mind. As it happens, I can’t think of anything better.
I ask him what advice he would give the young Rupert now. “Well, when it comes to going into theatre, one of the things you really have to take on board…”The word is that everyone has paid a lot of money to see you, so no matter how depressed you might feel, or how much you think you’re missing out on something…” His sentence trails off, as they often do. “I always felt I was missing out on some imaginary life happening somewhere else. That was my problem.”
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As Oscar Wilde in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in 2012. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis/Getty Images
That fear of missing out was usually tied to sex. Was he as obsessed with sex as he claims in his memoirs? “Oh yes.” It sounds like he couldn’t go a day without sleeping with a stranger. “Yes! Remember, the sexual revolution had only happened 10 years before. It was a booming time for sexual liberation. I think people felt you could find some kind of freedom. I felt I could break away from my past through sex. That it would somehow set you free.” He looked down on his privileged background—dull, rigid, and conservative in every way. He wanted a life full of adventure.
Was it fun, reckless, or both? “It’s just another thing I can’t imagine. I can’t picture that person. I think you forget how strong your hormones were once they dry up. And then it’s impossible to remember what that surge, those strong tides, really felt like. But those hormonal tides are intense.”
He talks fondly about his nights cruising on Hampstead Heath in London. The thrill of the unknown; the promise of lit cigarettes in the distance; being a leather queen. “Hampstead Heath was like being in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You’d go down into the darkness, pitch black, and you’d hear the scrunch scrunch scrunch of someone coming up, and then suddenly you’d see a galaxy of cigarette lights, like stars, a group of guys, and you’d hear someone being spanked and the echo of it across the heath.” Was he the spanker or the one being spanked? He smiles. “I was more of an observer. You’d head toward where the spanking was happening, and sometimes you’d have to walk for miles.” So you just watched? “Well, really, I didn’t like going that far. I was also very polite. I remember once thinking: ‘My God, that’s an incredible guy.’ And I cruised him for about half an hour, getting closer and closer, and eventually I realized it was a tree!”
Was sex more of a driving force than work? “Totally. That’s what I realized. Even work was really about cruising. Trying to be attractive. Which obviously came from feeling like I wasn’t attractive enough. My vanity wasn’t about ‘mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’ Vanity is often about deep insecurity, not about feeling how amazing I am.”
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With Firth in Another Country. Photograph: Ronald Grant
For so long, he felt like a freak—like Gollum. At 15, he was only 5 feet tall. By the time he was 18, he was 6 feet 4 inches—a human stick insect. “My butt was like two bones and a hole. And my legs were skeletal.” He didn’t know what to do with his new body, how to stand or hold himself properly.
Years before building a new body at the gym, he found a simpler solution. “I met these two queens in Tufnell Park who made bodysuits, and they made me a fake bottom, fake calves, fake shoulders, fake everything.” And did he wear them in movies? “Yes, in everything.” Did the directors know? “No! I’d go into costume fittings with all my stuff on.”
He seems to look back on those early years with a mix of warmth and horror. So many of his friends died young—from drugs, alcohol, heart attacks, accidents, and of course, AIDS. As a young man, he belonged to the live-fast-die-young crowd. “I couldn’t imagine being alive after 30.” Did he want to be? “No,Not when I was 20. It was James Dean. I wanted to die in a car crash.
Now he realizes it was the background he hated so much that actually protected him. Despite all the drugs he took, he never became an addict. And even with his chaotic lifestyle, he kept showing up for work. “There was a very middle-class work ethic underneath it all that kept me just back from the edge. And miraculously, I never got HIV. A lot of other people I knew did.” In Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, he writes about finding out his then-boyfriend had been diagnosed with HIV and just walking away because he couldn’t handle it. Life was supposed to be fun, and this was anything but.
“A lot of people like me got HIV and died. That’s another thing to consider when I can’t quite understand my own behavior. And for a long time, you couldn’t really test for HIV. So you didn’t know if you had it or not, and that was an added weird pressure for someone who had just become famous, because it was a very difficult time to be gay.”
Did he think he had HIV? “I thought I must have. Also, people treated you strangely. You’d go to families’ houses, and you could see them taking gay people’s plates away to wash them separately. Everyone felt under siege.”
The astonishing thing is that, throughout the years of casual hookups, Everett was also having relationships with some of the world’s most famous women – Susan Sarandon, Béatrice “Betty Blue” Dalle, and a six-year affair with TV presenter Paula Yates, while she was married to Bob Geldof. I can’t imagine you with Sarandon, I start to say; I think she would… He finishes my sentence. “Swallow me whole?” He grins and tears into his bacon sandwich. “Well, she didn’t. I loved all my relationships with women. I’m not sure they loved it, though.” Why? “Because I was so slippery.” In what sense? “Going off with other people.”
Why did he say his younger self was disingenuous? “Relationships,” he says instantly. “I just wanted to have more.” So how did that disingenuousness show itself? “Well, pretending to feel the right things when you didn’t.” And were you good at pretending? “Yep. I was always shifty. I was always trying to move on to the next thing. No one was ever enough.”
Did Geldof know about the relationship with Yates? “Yes.” Did it bother him? “I don’t know.” Yates died at 41 in 2000 from a heroin overdose. I ask Everett what she was like. “She was adorable and beautiful. She had the most adorable neck and a Tweety Pie forehead. We were bonded by our sense of drama. We loved things being dramatic and dangerous. She was a fragile rock – tough, but very vulnerable, too. We were kindred spirits.”
When they were mistaken for a regular heterosexual couple, he got a glimpse into a completely different way of life. “Being straight was heaven, because you fit in so well. When I was seeing Paula Yates, one night we went for dinner with [the actor] Gordon Jackson and his wife Rona while I was doing a play with him. He was a wonderful man. And it felt like the whole restaurant was celebrating the normalcy of two couples getting together, and Gordon was telling me about getting a mortgage, and I remember thinking: God, this is fitting in!” I bet you didn’t like it, I say. “Oh no, I felt like a wolf who wanted to get back out onto the heath. But I did feel for a moment: that’s what it’s like, belonging.”
Everett has always considered himself an outsider. He has never been successful for long enough to be an insider in the movie world. Not surprisingly, at his most dissolute, he fell out of favor. So he moved to France in 1986 for 12 years, where he hung out with a ragtag crowd ofHe’s spent time with artists, celebrities, alcoholics, drug users, sex workers, and people who were homeless on the streets. He’s also lived for long stretches in Italy, the US, Brazil, and Ireland.
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With Madonna in The Next Best Thing. Photograph: AJ Pics/Alamy
There have been a decent number of successful movies (two St Trinian’s films, Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third, The Madness of King George, An Ideal Husband), but there have been so many flops. The most notable might be The Next Best Thing from 2000, which hurt his Hollywood career and his friendship with Madonna. Have they made up? “Yes!” he yells. Would he like to say more? “Nope! No point in reopening old wounds.” But the great thing about failure, he says, is that it opens up so many new doors. “Lack of success is good for actors. It pushes you forward. And you never know where you’ll end up. It forces you to reinvent yourself.”
If he hadn’t had periods of being out of work, he would never have written his memoirs, novels (Hello Darling, Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St Tropez), and short stories (The American No, based on all his rejected screenplay ideas). He also wouldn’t have written, produced, directed, and starred in The Happy Prince, his film about Oscar Wilde’s final years, which he considers his best work. It’s a good film, I say, and surprisingly focused, considering he was in charge of everything. “Well, I think that’s what I’ve become. Someone who is quite disciplined.”
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With Colin Morgan (left) in The Happy Prince.
He says it’s a shame it took him until he was 60 to find that discipline. “I definitely regret that, because I had it in me somewhere. But I was too busy thinking about silly things.” Like what? He giggles. “Sex. If I’d found discipline earlier, I think I could have done a lot more. As it is, I’m trying to put together my second film, but at the rate I’m going, I’ll be saying ‘Action!’ at age 86.”
I mention Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who premiered his final feature film at age 104 in 2012. “That was then, darling! Nobody does that nowadays.” What’s his second film about? “It’s about me at 17, when my parents thought I was completely out of control—and I was—and they decided to send me on an exchange trip to Paris.” This was when his hormones were really raging.
I take it sex isn’t as important to him these days as it once was? “No.” He mentions #MeToo. “I had my own little #MeToo movement.” What does he mean? “I spent so much time having dinner with boring men, I thought: I’m not that into them anymore.” For decades, he’d been obsessed with the idea of men—their physicality, their sexuality—and it finally hit him that he found most of them dull. “They’re not what you think they are in the end. No one is. I liked certain superficial aspects, but I couldn’t really handle the idea of them as wholes.” He bursts out laughing. “Not holes. Wholes!” So, he no longer enjoyed the wining, dining, and talking part? “Yeah, you know. To get to first base, you had to ride around the rodeo a bit.”
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With Bianca Jagger in 2002. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
He says he’s amazed by the change in him. “I always thought when I was still clubbing and hanging out that I’d be one of those 75-year-olds in a tie-dye T-shirt at raves.” And you never go clubbing now? “No. I’m not interested. Not remotely interested. Well, I’m hardly interested in anything anymore.” It sounds like such a bleak thing to say, but he makes it seem like he’s reached a higher level of contentment. “I’m interested in dust particles and things like that.” Another hum-laugh. “I could quite happily just sit watching spring.” Well, wh”What could be better than that?” “Yeah, exactly. I love smaller things now, thank God. I need to quickly go for a pee, do you mind?” he asks.
While he’s gone, I think about another word he used to describe his younger self – lethal. When he comes back, I ask him about it. “Well, I was lethal. I only cared about myself and my own pleasure. That’s always lethal. I think I was a bit of a sociopath. I was a terrible gossip and repeated everything anyone told me. I’d borrow people’s clothes and never give them back.” How did you justify that behavior? “I don’t know. Very strange. I can’t. I don’t know how I justified it to myself. I was lethal.”
Is he less selfish now? He looks a little offended. “I’m still pretty selfish.” He pauses. “I’ve been very lucky. I’m spoiled to some extent, but yes, I think I am less selfish. Probably more considerate of other people’s space. You have to be when you live with someone.” He and Henrique, a Brazilian accountant, have been together for 16 years and got married two years ago. “As soon as you live with someone, that’s the end of that – otherwise you’d break up after five minutes. You have to make compromises, give ground.”
I ask him what he’s most proud of. He mentions the Wilde film, and then he says himself. That makes sense – Rupert Everett is probably his greatest creation. At 67, he’s getting more work than he has in a long time. He’s in the second series of Rivals as the wonderfully named Malise Gordon; plays an ancient, stooped butler to the eccentric 5th Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Paget, in the film Madfabulous; recently worked on Mel Gibson’s biblical epic The Resurrection of the Christ; and next year will be in Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land, directed by Patrick Marber, at the Donmar Warehouse in London. But what pleases him even more than getting the work is that he’s finally giving it – and the audience – the respect they always deserved. “I now really enjoy acting and take it incredibly seriously.”
He bites into his bacon sandwich and says it’s taken a while, but he truly believes he’s now a fully grown adult. “I think I only grew up at age 55. My voice didn’t break until I was 35. I think it’s because I had a very long adolescence.” Shortly after turning 50, he was cast in Pygmalion at the Chichester Festival Theatre, and he could feel all the old flaws threatening to bring him down again – boredom, petulance, FOMO. “I felt the whole thing starting up again. I went in feeling awful and I saw a hypnotist and said, ‘Please can you just make me feel happy going to work?’ And it worked.” And it’s kept working.
In 2018, after decades away from home, he and Henrique moved back to Wiltshire to be close to Everett’s mother and take care of her. His father had died nine years earlier, and he felt he had let them down so many times. Now he wanted to do right by her in her final years.
Taking care of his mother, he says, has changed him more than anything. It made him rethink his early adulthood and the kind of person he has become. “I was so close to the edge in so many ways when I was young, without even realizing it. Then, living with my mum and her generation of rationing, blitz-mentality people, I realized that’s what got me through that early version of myself. Discipline that I didn’t even know I had.”
Everett used to be a socialist (the champagne kind, of course) and despised David Cameron because he reminded him of the posh people he grew up with. Now he describes himself as a pro-Europe conservative with a small c.
For all the rebelliousLooking at his life, he seems pretty old-fashioned, I say. Even his early rejection of social norms feels like a throwback to an older generation of gay radicals like Wilde and Quentin Crisp. “Well, I think I have thrown myself back in a way. Living with my mother in her final years, being close to her and her world, felt like being pulled back by the tide to the beaches of your youth. I found I really admired the people I had mostly rejected all my life. They were so stoic about their problems.” Has he become one of them? “I’ve become a country blob. That’s what I am. I walk my dog, I write my books, and I feel like I’ve become my mum and dad since they died. In a way, I feel very much like I am them.”
Even though he adored his mother, he spent so much of his life trying to win her disapproval. Not anymore. She passed away last year, and he can’t begin to express how much he misses her. As I get ready to leave, he asks if there’s any chance I won’t mention that he used to be a rent boy. Well, it’s a bit late for that, I say—it’s been public knowledge for over 40 years, and it’s part of your story. “I know,” he says, a little sheepishly. “It’s just that Mum used to get so upset about it.”
Madfabulous is released in UK cinemas on 5 June, and the second series of Rivals is on Disney+.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the phrase I felt like I could destroy my past through sex as explored in the context of Rupert Everetts life and work
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does it mean to destroy your past through sex
It means using sex as a way to rebel against or erase a painful or restrictive past For Rupert Everett this often meant using sexual encounters to reject his conservative upbringing his closeted youth or feelings of shame
2 Is this a quote from Rupert Everett
Yes or a close paraphrase of his own reflections He has spoken openly in interviews and his memoirs about using sex as a form of selfdestruction and rebellion against his past
3 Was Rupert Everetts past really that harsh
He has described a difficult childhood growing up in a military family feeling like an outsider struggling with his sexuality in a homophobic era and experiencing the trauma of the AIDS crisis This created a lot of internal conflict
4 Does destroying your past through sex actually work
No not in a healthy lasting way Its a temporary feeling You cant literally erase memories or pain through actions The attempt often leads to more pain emptiness or risky behavior
5 Is this idea only about Rupert Everett
No While he has articulated it powerfully its a common theme for people who use sex as a coping mechanism for trauma shame or rebellion Many people can relate to the feeling of trying to burn away a past self
IntermediateLevel Questions
6 How does this theme show up in Rupert Everetts books or movies
Its a central theme in his memoirs especially Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins He writes candidly about his promiscuity drug use and selfsabotage as a direct reaction to his past In his film roles he often plays characters who are witty selfdestructive and sexually rebellious
7 What is the redemption part of the phrase
The redemption comes from
