SIMON CALLOW.

The legendary British actor on gay life pre-liberation, the value of monogamy, and why straight actors should play gay.

When film and stage icon Simon Callow came out in 1984, he became one of the first British actors to publicly declare their homosexuality – and in an entirely unremarkable manner. Far from reducing his career to ruin, as many stars worry would happen even now, Simon went on to star in several high-profile stage shows and films including, most famously, hit British rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral.

As he rehearses for the lead role in Theatre Royal Bath’s production of A Song At Twilight, Noël Coward’s critically-acclaimed swan song, we sat down with Simon to look back over key moments in his life, from his discovery of the gay scene, to coming out to his family, to getting married to his husband Sebastian.

What is your first memory of being gay?

My first real encounter with gay people – or the gay world – was when I worked at the box office at The Old Vic Theatre in 1967. But I knew fully well, for my whole life, that I was attracted to people of my own gender. So I read everything I could, all the novels that mentioned gay people, and the various – normally very depressing – books about homosexuality. There’s a very famous one by a man called D. J. West, just called Homosexuality, and it was so, so depressing. It basically said that homosexuality is unnatural, and the lives of homosexuals are deeply, deeply distressing and could never be fulfilling. It didn’t stop me from fancying men, but it was dismaying reading. When I got into the theatre, I discovered there was a whole world of gay people. There were gay bars, gay pubs, gay shows, and nobody at The Old Vic Theatre thought there was anything odd about being gay at all. As long as you kept quiet about it. That was the one demand – not in the theatre, but outside the theatre – to be discrete. And in a way, that behindclosed-doors world was not without its excitement, as if you were in the resistance or something.

Do you miss that sense of excitement?

Sort of. I was never deeply embedded in that world, but there was a vein of humour, where everybody was called ‘she’ and it was outrageous. It was rather gorgeous in a way. But it wasn’t natural to me. I wasn’t naturally camp – people may tell me I’m wrong – and I wasn’t at all queeny, it wasn’t my thing. And then I started to become aware of gay liberation, the new thinking about gay people, which was, ‘Out of the ghetto, and into the streets’, and I was a bit taken by that. Curiously enough, it wasn’t until I went to drama school that I actually lost my virginity. I was already 21, which is quite late for then, considering the whole of the scene was about picking people up, but I wasn’t that comfortable in the scene, and I never felt – certainly at that age – that I was instantly attractive to people. I felt that I didn’t have the right look and was probably a bit heavy, and had a very poor self-image. When I went to drama school I sort of plunged into, as it were, my own gay life, which is when I started to live with somebody, and life was totally different. It wasn’t about the scene, it was about living with another man and everything that involved. But I was, by the time I left drama school, a little bit radicalised, because the drama centre was very open about homosexuality. So I started working and going on tour – I’d now broken up with the guy I was living with – and then I did start going to gay bars, and I started learning how to pick people up a bit. I’ve never been very good at that, I have to say, but I did it. Then I was asked to go and read for a play that the Gay Sweatshop were putting on, it was called Passing By, and what was fantastic about it was that it’s a light comedy about two guys who have a relationship, and then they get ill, they nurse each other through that, and then they part. That was, to me, like real life, so I was really keen to act in this play, but I knew that if I was going to act in it then I needed to come out to my mother. She was completely dismissive of the whole thing. She thought sex in general was a bad idea, she didn’t care whether it was straight or gay sex. I’d already told my grandmother, who was deeply sympathetic, and rather magnificently said, ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ and I said, ‘No’, and then she asked, ‘Are you a homo?’ So I said, ‘Yes, I am’. Then she said, ‘Far be it from me to deny love from anyone’.

That’s pretty incredible.

It is! And it was such a perfect endorsement. I was incredibly lucky in that regard. Then I was involved with Stonewall and all of that kind of thing, and eventually, not much later, I was asked to play Mozart in Amadeus at The National Theatre. And for the first time in my life I was interviewed by journalists, and they would always ask, ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ and I would always say, ‘No, I’m gay’. But they never published it.

Why do you think that is?

Well, I realised after a while that they didn’t want me to tell them, they wanted to expose me. Shock, horror! There’s no story in, ‘Gay man admits he’s gay’. So it didn’t go public that I was gay. Later, at the end of a run at the West End, I was asked to write a book about acting. I felt that my life was changing in all sorts of ways. I was directing for the first time, teaching for the first time, working in America for the first time, so I wrote the book, and I said very clearly that I was gay, I described the experience of the Gay Sweatshop and all that, and people be¤ed me to excise that from the book. But I said, ‘The book has got to be honest. I’m trying to tell the truth about an actor’s life’. It’s an essential part of my life. So it was published, and there were no repercussions at all as far as I know, except that there were a lot of people who said to me, ‘I’m going to follow your example’. Ian McKellen and Antony Sher were both, I think, influenced by the fact that I’d written it and not been blasted off the face of the earth.

When you were growing up, did you ever imagine that you’d be able to get married?

No, I never did, but I never particularly wanted it either, I have to say. Because, one step at a time, you know? I wasn’t that animated by the idea of living a married life. It didn’t strike me as a particularly

enlightened state, because all the marriages in my family had been such disasters. My parents, my grandparents, my cousins and all the rest of them.

What changed your mind?

Just meeting Sebastian, really. I realised that he was deeply and seriously interested in commitment, and I think with all of my long-term relationships – and there have been many of them – there was never any understanding that they would last forever. There was always a get-out clause, as it were. And they were wonderful relationships, I’m still in touch with everybody that I’ve lived with, or had any sort of extended affair with, but they wouldn’t have worked as marriages. When I met Sebastian I knew absolutely that he was the person I could commit myself to. Now, I’m nearly 70 and Sebastian is 36, so that’s an amazing gap, he’s half my age, so for me to commit myself for the rest of my life is one thing, but for him to commit himself for the rest of my life is another. But I have never doubted that that relationship is for good. It’s been wonderful.

Some LGBTQ people argue that getting married is an act of ascribing to a heterosexual lifestyle... I know they say that, and an old friend of mine was a real opponent of anything that looked like gay people committing to society as it exists, but I’ve never held that view at all. I’ve always held the view that gay people are pretty well like other people, with the difference that they’re attracted to their own sex. Gay people don’t necessarily inherently have anything in common, apart from that one thing. In times of crisis like the AIDS crisis, then yes, certainly quite a lot of gay people will work with other gay people, but I’ve always slightly distrusted the phrase, ‘the gay community’. I suppose there is one in a loose sense, but what I feel is that many gay people – not all, there’s no reason why they should all want to – but most gay people want what most other people want, which is a deep and abiding relationship with somebody else, one which grows and nourishes. And I’m inclined to think that this means sexual fidelity. Once you stop looking over your shoulder thinking, ‘I could always be scampering off with somebody else for a bit on the side’, you can absolutely focus on the relationship you do have, and go into it as deeply as you possibly can. That road, to me, is so much more fulfilling. But that’s me. I wouldn’t dream of imposing on anyone else, or thinking less of them for wanting that, but if the thing you want is great depth in your relationship, I think that requires monogamy. But I’m making no rules. Who the fuck am I to make rules for anyone else?

As someone who came out in the 80s and went on to have a successful career, why do you think there aren’t more openly LGBTQ actors in Hollywood now?

Well first of all, I think it’s a con, this idea that coming out will destroy your career. I don’t think, in general, the public feels that, I think it’s just hysteria on the part of executives. They put so much money into these films, they can’t risk them doing badly, so they want to control every factor they possibly can. But among my friends who do work in movies, I gather from them that actually most gay actors, knowing the way things are in Hollywood, just avoid it. I don’t think there are that many well-known actors before the public who are gay and closeted. I know of a couple of actors – who I presumably shouldn’t name – who are really quite famous, and are definitely gay. There’s no question about it. [Kevin] Spacey was one of them, before the scandal erupted pretty much everyone knew that he was gay, and there are other actors for whom the same could be said. But it doesn’t seem to me like there are a lot of James Deans or Rock Hudsons or Tab Hunters who are hiding. It’s my belief that most actors who are gay and who want to be out just say, ‘I’m not even going to bother with Hollywood’. It’s much more possible to be out and gay on American television. Hollywood’s a weird place. There’s something unnatural about it, something bizarre. It’s so self-obsessed and so anxious about everything.

Do you believe in the notion that gay roles should be reserved for gay actors?

Not at all. How could I? I play straight people all the time. It’s quite obvious that acting is about imagination and entering into another person’s mind. If I play Shylock, then it would be fascinating for me to enter into another person’s religion, another person’s cultural experience. I’m not Jewish – I know enough, because I have many close Jewish friends – and I’ve not gone through my life as a Jew, but I would immerse myself in the Orthodox community, because you would have to believe that I knew what I was saying and doing. That’s acting, and it’s what acting has always been. I think it’s ironic, certainly, that there are so many straight people who want to play gay parts now, but I think they’re often very good. I think when they enter into the world, like Chalamet and Hammer did in Call Me By Your Name, it’s entirely believable, and it’s interesting as a gay man to see the perspective of someone who isn’t gay looking incredibly closely at the way it is.