Born to be Wilde
Rupert Everett feels at home as Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss at the Ed Mirvish Theatre
It’s an age-old story: talented performer turns acclaim on the theatrical boards into a successful career in film.
Rupert Everett already lived that story once. It was while performing in the play Another Country in London’s West End in the early 1980s that the English actor first caught the eye of film producers, leading to acclaimed roles in Dance With a Stranger, a filmed version of Another Country, and eventually his best-known mainstream movie appearance as Julia Roberts’ gay other half in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997).
After that point, according to Everett, he passed a certain “sell-by date” in Hollywood.
“My shelf life was over — for the time being,” says Everett, now 56. In the meantime, he became fascinated by the story of the Irish playwright, poet and essayist Oscar Wilde, in particular the later period of the writer’s life in which he was prosecuted for gross indecency with other men (that is, gay sex), which led to his imprisonment and early death.
It sounded like a great idea for a film, which Everett decided to write, direct, star in and produce. Problem was, he couldn’t get the movie funded.
The answer? Get back to the boards. Everett recalled the play The Judas Kiss by English writer David Hare, which dramatizes exactly the period of Wilde’s life he was interested in, and which he’d seen in its world premiere in 1998. “I had the idea of being in David’s play so that I could prove to people that I could play Oscar Wilde and get money for my film.”
The resulting production premiered at London’s Hampstead Theatre in September 2012, transferred to the West End the following year and is currently playing at the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto before heading to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music.
For those who associate Everett with the willowy figure he cut in his earlier film roles, it’s not automatically easy to picture him as the famously jowly Wilde.
“I’ve been playing this for a few years and I’ve sort of . . . grown into him,” chuckles Everett in a phone interview.
“I prepared a look; it’s good and all tricked up. I have somehow managed to be very convincing as Oscar Wilde.”
The critics agree. The London Telegraph’s Charles Spencer wrote that, watching the play, “you feel like you are in the company of Oscar himself,” while the Guardian’s Michael Billington calls it “the performance of Everett’s career.”
Everett says he is fascinated by Wilde as Hare writes him, in that he’s “a great character, a mixture of intelligence and stupidity. It’s kind of a cartoon version of all of our lives.”
Stupid, in Everett’s view, because Wilde went forward in prosecuting the father of his young male lover, who accused him of sodomy, even though Wilde knew the claims against him were based in truth.
“He thought he was bigger than the system and he went into this insane court case and he lost everything . . . He was in the highest echelons of London society, connected to royalty and all that, and he was drunk on it, slightly.”
The story also resonates on a personal and political level with Everett, who is gay: “Oscar is a kind of Christ figure. After all, the homosexual movement didn’t really exist as a talked-about subject until Wilde . . . His extreme suffering went on from the moment of his conviction to the end of his life. It’s one of the most inspiring things to me, and moving somehow.”
Everett came out in the 1980s and says that his sexuality has been a defining feature of his professional life. “It negatively affected my career and it positively affected it . . . it becomes bigger than anything you can do as an actor.”
Famously outspoken, Everett was quoted in the British media several years ago as being opposed to gay people becoming parents but is quite eager to set the record straight on what he calls “a typical example of runaway press.”
He had been speaking, he explains, to the London Times for a column called “Relative Values,” in which two members of a family speak about their relationship; his co-interviewee was his mother.
“They asked me if I wanted to have had two fathers and I said, no, I didn’t. The thing is, I have absolutely no issue with gay parenting! I was doing an article about my mother, and talking about women and men in my family.”
So what about Everett’s dreamed-of film about Wilde’s last years? Amazingly enough, his theatrical wager worked: the film goes into pre-production the day after The Judas Kiss closes in New York. Everett absolutely believes that his stage appearance as Oscar is what turned funders’ heads: “After being in the play, that’s when the movie began to turn around.”
Financing for the British-German-Belgian co-production, titled The Happy Prince, closed in February and Everett anticipates a mid-2017 release.
Everett describes the eight-year film financing saga as “hell,” but also affirms that being in Wilde’s world has unlocked opportunities for him as a performer he could never have anticipated: “I am totally surprising myself; I didn’t imagine that it would . . . This has taken me to a level as an actor I’ve never been before.”