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I just don’t understand theMODERN WORLD!
He hates Facebook. He’s gone off human beings in general. And in his next life, he’d like to be a tree. As Rupert Everett brings his Oscar Wilde epic to the screen, he tells David Wigg he’s glad his own wild days are over…
Rupert Everett is lucky Colin Firth is a forgiving chap. Or his new film The Happy Prince, a passion project about Oscar Wilde that Rupert wrote, directed and stars in, may never have been made.
Despite the pair’s friendship getting off to a wobbly start – Rupert admits he was downright horrible – they became good enough pals that Colin agreed to take a role in Rupert’s film, and his star power helped raise the money to make it. Even now, before the film’s opening this month, it is generating the sort of buzz its writer has dreamed of for more than a decade.
‘Colin has done me the greatest act of friendship – without him the film would never have happened. He stood by it all the way through,’ says Rupert. ‘ The whole deal- making structure of films nowadays relies on going to potential financial sources with names of leading actors. When I first wrote the script for The Happy Prince, Colin came and did the first reading. He hadn’t yet done The King’s Speech or A Single Man. But we were both hot off St Trinian’s 2.
‘He signed on but it took years and years to get the money together. And he was the deal. It was about him taking part. So in a sense I owe the whole thing to him – as well as Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson and everybody in the movie. But Colin was the person that everybody fixed on. If he had dropped out, then my film would have collapsed. Which is a big responsibility for someone to have.’
It’s hard to believe the pair ended up such steadfast friends, given their first encounter, in their 20s, when they both appeared in the 1984 hit Another Country. Rupert was playing gay public schoolboy Guy Bennett and Colin was fellow schoolboy Tommy Judd, a Marxist. Rupert wasn’t happy about the casting, as he had a huge crush on his co-star and was keen to do a few love scenes.
‘I wanted him to play the other character, James Harcourt [Bennett’s love interest, a role played by Cary Elwes], because I fancied him,’ he admits. ‘I was crazy about Colin and I was determined that he would be the other character. And then, typical me, as soon as he was in the film, I went right off him, so then I was horrible to him.
‘ I was very mercurial in those days. I tortured him. So we did fall out a bit. Then we fell back in a bit filming Shakespeare In Love in 1998.’ In the Oscar-winning film, Rupert played Christopher Marlowe and Colin was Lord Wessex. ‘Then we made Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest in 2002 and that led to
us becoming great friends. By then I could make him laugh – something I found ridiculously satisfying. And after that, we made the St Trinian’s films in 2007 and 2009.
‘With growing older in the business, it’s such fun when you’ve known people since you were teenagers. It’s much more of a laugh. And I adore Colin.’
In The Happy Prince, the pair play friends, too – Rupert is Oscar Wilde and Colin is his close ally, writer Reggie Turner. Emily Watson is Wilde’s estranged wife Constance, Tom Wilkinson plays Catholic priest Father Dunne and Colin Morgan is Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s spoilt young aristocratic lover. The story takes place in the painful f inal years of Wilde’s life, after he’d served time in prison for ‘gross indecency’ with men, and while he was living in exile in Naples and Paris, penniless, in poor health after two years of hard labour, and facing abuse from expat Brits.
Wilde’s final days are something other films about his life have shied away from. But this shows Oscar in all his crumbling magnificence, trying to keep up a buoyant facade to the end.
Playing the tortured character is a challenge for any man. But Colin Firth was impressed by the way Rupert juggled acting with directing, saying, ‘One minute he’d be raging at Bosie, poeticising in French or cavorting with young Italians, the next he’d be up a ladder with the lens, in a nightgown over a fat-suit, deciding on the next shot.’ To disguise his angular good looks, Rupert didn’t stop with the fat suit. He put padding inside his mouth to make his face look wider and older, and shot himself on widening lenses. He also
‘I tortured Colin Firth, I was horrible to him’
shaved his head so he could wear a wig moulded to Oscar’s hairstyle.
And before that, as part of his research, Rupert went to L’Hôtel, Paris, and stayed in the same bedroom where Oscar stayed while there and where he died in 1900, aged just 46. ‘But no message came through – I was hoping for one! I didn’t like the hotel. It’s so claustrophobic, the winding staircase and too many drapes and too much dust. I didn’t like it at all. ‘I’m an old-fashioned actor, I’m moving from the outside in. I was after the image of the character, then the rest came. I moved myself into a Wildean model – and that was it. That worked very well and I had a great costume designer too.’
In a sense, Oscar Wilde has been a part of Rupert since he was six. He remembers his mother reading him Wilde’s children’s story The Happy Prince, the heartbreaking tale of a statue of a prince who takes pity on poor townsfolk, and the swal- low who sacrifices his life to help the prince aid them. ‘I remember it very well,’ he says. ‘I think my emotional development kind of stopped, in a way, around that age. The things that really move me still are things I first experienced then, from Bambi’s mother’s death to the end of The House At Pooh Corner, when Christopher Robin tries to explain to Pooh that he’s not going to see him any more because he’s going away to school. Even if I read that now, I get emotional.
‘And I remember perfectly my mother reading me The Happy Prince at that time. She was in her Jackie Onassis period, with big, white plastic earrings and short hair and a mini-dress. She was the perfect person. The relationship one has with one’s mother when one is six or seven is so complete. That was my first introduction to Wilde.’
As he grew, he identified with the struggles the writer had faced. ‘I came
out as gay in the middle of the 1970s in my late teens, and that was quite extraordinary, as it had only been legal to be gay for eight years. The police had not taken the legality much to heart. They still arrested us, right up to the 80s. You could be in the Gigolo Club, Chelsea, or wherever – there were often raids. So Oscar Wilde’s story was very much of the vernacular. We were still walking in his footsteps of illegality and imprisonment.
‘After that, at drama school, I went off him a bit because we all wanted to do things more modern and shocking and Wilde’s work seemed very conventional. Everybody wanted something different, not boring old Wilde or Coward plays. But they were what I would make my career being in.’
He appeared in his first Wilde production at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre in 1993 – an adaptation of the novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray. It was a huge success. ‘I realised I had a great affinity for the text. It just happened to fit me very well. I suppose I’m that dirty term, “a light comedian”. Once you manage to make Wilde sound casual and throwaway and humorous, it’s wonderful. I knew how to do it for some reason.’ He was in the 1999 film of Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband. ‘And I did David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss about Wilde in 2012 – that was a great success for me too. Then my career came to a standstill, as usual!
‘It always hits a brick wall at a certain point, for some reason. I always get so far and then hit a brick wall.’
After his huge success in My Best Friend’s Wedding in 1997, in which he stole the show as Julia Roberts’s friend, and the well-received Shakespeare In Love and An Ideal Husband, he co- starred with Madonna in the panned film The Next Best Thing in 2000. Things then went a little quiet. ‘I wasn’t getting many roles at all. Everything was drying up. I thought, “I refuse to give in and give up and become some awful depressed blob, an also-ran.”’
During a dry period Rupert began to write his memoirs. The first volume, witty and pithy, was published in 2006 and he started on his Oscar Wilde script around 2007. ‘I didn’t want to play tiny roles, so I created myself a role. The best role for me to write would be Oscar. And Oscar in exile – all the other films cover the period before he goes to prison. And I thought, now really is the time to go further and show what society did to him, beyond prison. So I wrote it, and between that time and making it, it became an obsession.
‘For me he was more than a misfit in society. I think Wilde’s a Christ-like figure for the gay movement. In other words, Christians have their crosses to bear and they relate those crosses to that of Christ and it’s nice for them. Wilde is the source of inspiration for me.’
When Rupert started out with his ambitious project, he says, he felt it was going to be a huge success. ‘I’d sent the script to Robert Fox, my producer, and he was immediately excited. He took it to Scott Rudin, who is the best producer in the world. He rang the next day saying, “I love it.” I was walking on air. God! I was doing my acceptance speeches in the mirror! I was spending money. I thought, “I’m back.”
‘But the day after, Scott rang again and said, “By the way, I don’t want you to play Oscar Wilde. I want Philip Seymour Hoffman.” And I said no. It was a depressing moment and I persuaded him to keep going with the film if I found six potential directors. Then, of course, I had to find the money, and that’s very lonely. But despite it all, I had a current pulling me and this story along. And every time I was about to give up, something happened.’
Gosh it’s a tough business, I remark. ‘Tough but good. I would never have done this otherwise. I’d never have become a writer, because after so many disappointments I wrote my books. So struggle is really important. And this is the thing that maybe nowadays we forget, because people are not prepared for struggle. But struggle is fertilising. Blades of grass growing out of a concrete slab. The low points are always the points of growth for me.’
As always, Rupert is brilliantly entertaining company. We’re meeting at Kettner’s Townhouse hotel in Soho, in its restaurant, where Oscar Wilde used to entertain his lovers. It’s the day of the Royal Wedding, and before we start he decides he wants to watch the television to catch the bride arriving at Windsor Castle, and see her dress.
Spotting the youngsters the couple have chosen to help Meghan with her 16ft veil reminds him of the many times he’s been a page boy. And that
‘My career came to a standstill – as usual!’
Colin Firth wasn’t the first person he was horrible to. ‘I was a page boy to my nanny and I ruined her wedding. I tried to stop her getting married and I pulled on the veil so hard I pulled it off her head. She had one of those hair pieces on and that came off too. And I made a huge scene crying at the church and had to be dragged out.’
Today, more grown up – he’s 59 but looks considerably younger, even with a beard – he’s no longer the wild child he was when expel led f rom drama school for being insubordinate, and dabbling with drugs during his search for stardom.
Right from the start of his career, he wanted fame as fast as he could get it. ‘Fame is wonderful, but most of all I wanted to be sexy. I just wanted everyone to think I was the sexiest thing on the planet, which I wasn’t. I was a good-looking man, but I wanted to be sexy. Like Steve McQueen or James Dean. Sexy to everybody. Sexy on a massive scale.
‘ Now I ’m the opposite actually. Quite reclusive. I haven’t been wild for a long time. I went through a period in my 40s when I was a bit like that. Then I went into a relationship [with Brazilian accountant Henrique], which I’m still in. It’s been ten years now, which is amazing and fabulous. He’s my best friend.’
Another change has been that he has moved in with his mother, now 84, into the family’s beautiful Queen Anne home in Wiltshire. ‘We don’t live together. We live side by side. She lives in a little bit by the side and I live in her house.’ He wanted to move in to keep an eye on her, as his father died a few years ago.
All these changes have led him to naturally move away from drugs, heavy drinking and clubs. ‘I’m so relieved because I’d always imagined I’d be one of those
75- years- olds on ecstasy, in a tie- dyed T- shirt being a pest at a rave. And I just couldn’t imagine myself stopping. But there’s a certain point when you lose that kind of curiosity. I don’t feel curious about men any more. Not like I used to. And I’m too old to take drugs. I want to keep my brain as alive as it can be. That’s what I’d really like.
‘My curiosity is about completely different things. History, and how we got to be where we are. That’s what is more interesting, and that is what’s most interesting about Wilde – that, a second ago, really, you went to prison for being gay. I think the story of my film is, for me, very inspirational because I think the more history we know, the more we can attack the problems that we have now, with a t r uly posi tive mindset.’
Ageing does not b o t h e r Ruper t , and surprisingly he says, ‘I’m longing for death. I’d love to be a tree for my next life. Some beautiful tree like an oak that doesn’t get a disease. I don’t know, I’m rather off human beings to be honest, in general.
‘I certainly wouldn’t like to be young. I’m so pleased to be as old as I am, I don’t understand the modern world. I don’t want to be virtual. I don’t want to be part of the Facebook group. I can’t stand the Big Brother Rupert (right) and Colin Firth in 1984 film Another Country aspect of our governments. We have absolutely no freedom. We have less and less. I mean, it’s gone insane. ‘So I still feel quite angry about things. But also very lucky. I’ve survived in my business. Contrary to what people might think, it hasn’t been handed to me on a plate. I’ve always had to elbow my way to the middle, and I feel good about that. ‘I would like to keep engaged with it, if I can. And I think now, more than ever, there’s room for older voices in film-making, because the narrative can’t just be taken over by a millennial generation, who don’t have any historical sense beyond six months ago. Because otherwise it’s a goldfish world we’re living in. One swish around the bowl, you’ve forgotten what happened. So I feel engaged. Maybe my film’s a one-off. But I hope I’m going to be able to do more. Because I’ve got lots more things I’d love to try to do.’
The early signs for The Happy Prince are good, with some critics raving about it when it was shown earlier this year at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. And already there are whispers that it could be a contender for an Oscar. An Oscar for Oscar!
Rupert isn’t resting on his laurels. He’s halfway through writing his third volume of memoirs and has been filming a major television series in Rome, based on Umberto Eco’s novel The Name Of The Rose, this time playing a monk. ‘From Oscar to a monk!’ he chuckles.
But has he reached a point in his life where he feels happy? ‘It depends on the day, to be honest. Some days I feel very fulfilled and some days I feel absolutely wretched. It’s difficult. I’m moody, but I can become utterly hysterical in a matter of seconds!’ The Happy Prince is in London West End cinemas from 15 June, and in cinemas nationwide from 22 June.
‘I wanted to be sexy on a massive scale. I wasn’t’