Rupert Everett on his Oscar Wilde homage The Happy Prince

After a decade in the works, Rupert Everett’s film about Oscar Wilde’s last days in Paris, The Happy Prince, which the British actor wrote, directed and stars in, is finally finished. Happily, it’s also really good. He tells Esquire about a true labour of

ESQUIRE: You’re no stranger to Oscar Wilde. Why does he fascinate you? RUPERT EVERETT: “Coming to London in the mid-Seventies aged 17, being gay, I think we all felt we were still on the outlaw side of things, outsiders, and that we were walking in the footsteps of Oscar Wilde because the scandal was still very much alive. In one sense, the gay liberation movement really started with him in the UK. Also, the character of him is so funny and amusing and witty. Even, actually, in his last years as a kind of vagabond. He’s touching, moving, like a clown in a way but also a genius.” ESQ: Why did you name the film after his famed children’s story?

RE: “My mum read me The Happy Prince when I was a child, and so it’s branded on my memory. And something felt right about the idea of calling Wilde in Paris ‘the happy prince’ because I think, despite everything, he was still enjoying himself in a way. The story about the happy prince is that he’s a statue who gives away all his silver and gold, all of his rubies to the poor, and then he’s got nothing left and they pull him down; it felt like a good analogy.” ESQ: In your memoirs, The Vanished Years, you write about “black bile bubbling” from your father when he was ill, and there is a very similar scene in the film. Is that deliberate? RE: “It was definitely deliberate. Watching my father die was one of my inspirations because my film is essentially a death-bed story, with someone lying in bed over a twoweek period, remembering various parts of his life. So the black bile was very much something that happened to my dad, and also happened to Oscar, funnily enough.”

ESQ: Do you see the film as a way of keeping Wilde relevant?

RE: “I’d love that. It also reminds people of society’s hostility towards minorities, and towards gays in particular: people are still being chucked off roofs; in Russia, in Jamaica, in China, in India, it’s still a very violent experience. I think one of the reasons no one’s ever told this side of the story is that it’s too embarrassing to remember that this is what we do to people. But we still do it, actually.”

ESQ: How will you judge its success? RE: “The real success for me is, after years of half-hearted flakiness in my life, to have managed to focus for so long on one thing and drive it through all the hurdles. I’m one of those people who’s given up at the first fence, and what I’ve discovered on this is that I have much more strength than I imagined.”

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The Happy Prince is out on 15 June