Stephen Fry reveals the relationship advice that helped him ‘relax’

A rare polymath, 63-year-old Stephen Fry has written, among other works, satirical novels, a trio of unsparing memoirs, a charming how-to-write-poetry book and reimaginings of the Greek myths (the latest of which, Troy, was released in June). In his native England, he has hosted quiz shows, documentaries and podcasts. He has acted in TV (the Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster is a highlight) and film (earning praise in 1997 for his portrayal of his hero Oscar Wilde in Wilde). Lately, he has settled into the role of avuncular public intellectual. “I’m terribly keen to find things out if I don’t know about them,” Fry says. “Then I need to show what I know. It reminds you of people at school who just had to put their hand up and go, ‘I know! I know!’ It’s strange that I’ve never lost that desire.”

Q: There’s not a lot of playfulness in the larger cultural discourse these days. It can all feel so strident and humourless. Where do you look when you don’t want to be depressed by everybody scolding one another?
A: That is the situation we’re in, of course, and because of that, I have to give a little mental check to make sure that I’m not going to say anything that is going to get me into trouble. But most of my solace is looking backward, reading. I’m trying to teach myself more. I’ve been reading things like Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, and a friend of mine put me on to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

I was intrigued with what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. How come when something aggressive occurs just outside your little moral, political and cultural bubble – a statement by someone you really dislike; it could be Eric Trump or some figure like that of no significance in the world – you find yourself trembling with fury at the person who is saying these things because they strike you as so dumb, so cruel, so deceptive, whatever it is?

What we have to understand is that once we have our set of rules and outlooks, any suggestion that those may be wrong becomes a suggestion that I may be wrong. It’s an assault on my Self with a capital S. That’s partly what Freud meant by the narcissism of small differences: that arguments become deeply personal.

Q: Do you ever wonder where your old friend Christopher Hitchens would fit into things now?

A: I do. I loved him. He was adorable company, but I was also quite scared of him. He was a much tougher figure than I. He didn’t mind being disliked. He didn’t mind being howled down, even. He seemed to enjoy it. I can quite imagine Hitchens being on the same platform with a Ben Shapiro [American conservative political commentator] perhaps. But I can’t imagine him having come out on the side of Donald Trump.

Hitchens just had a style that suited America despite his Britishness. It was the swagger. I miss that the culture doesn’t have enough of these sorts of people. Towards the last year of his life I would visit another one of them, Gore Vidal, in Los Angeles, where he had his house; it was so overgrown in the garden that it was dark inside. He would retell stories of his great rows with Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag and William Buckley. Their arguments could be mordant and full of venom, but they weren’t as unhappy as so many debates now. There was a kind of joy and pleasure in the fight.

Fry as Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film, Wilde. Credit: Alamy

Q: I watched a discussion you took part in last October on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Royal Society of Literature, and you talked about the formative experience of reading The Trials of Oscar Wilde as an adolescent. You said something to the effect that if you’d grown up 20 years later, your feelings of shame or guilt about being gay probably would have been different, but also that perhaps you wouldn’t have had this sort of Wildean key to literature that you then developed. Do you have any other sense of how you might be different if you were growing up gay today?

A: It’s very difficult to know. But I’m pretty certain that if I had grown up and there were video games and 24-hour television and a candy-store approach to movies – if there was all this fun laid out, let alone social media and computers – I can’t imagine that I would have had the impulse to go to libraries and make this web of connections radiating out from Oscar.

That was the first thing that hit me like a hammer: when I read about the life of this extraordinary man and saw what it came to and then realised that the crime he committed was one that I was likely to commit – that we had a similar nature. Discovering his whole world: I went from Wilde to the French writers Huysmans and Rachilde, then through to American writers: Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, or John Rechy’s City of Night, and William Burroughs and the extraordinary sexual adventures going on there.

Q: Something I didn’t realise until I was researching for this interview was that you were celibate for 15 years. What was going on there?

A: Oh, yes, that’s right. We’ve got 15 years in which I was not partnered or, as the phrase now is, I self-partnered. From ’96 onwards, I’ve tended to have a partner, and for the past five-and-a-half years I’ve been happily married [to British comedian Elliott Spencer].

But I’ve been thinking about this a lot since this TV show that I had a small part in came out: It’s a Sin. It did make me think: I left university in 1981, ’round about the time that any sexual adventuring I would’ve done would’ve been fantastically dangerous. Most people would say it’s a pretty odd coincidence that my celibacy lasted from the widespread arrival of the AIDS virus to the arrival of widespread antiretroviral medication. Also, I loathed nightclubs. That feeling of walking inside and being raked with stares and then the look-away as you clearly did not pass the test. And the music – I don’t know how to dance in nightclubs.

Q: Was it scary to eventually go back to sexual relationships?

A: Yes. You can get consumed by a fear that you’ve been out of the game of love for so long that you just don’t know any of the rules. You don’t know how it’s done. Even the smallest details of it, like, how do couples share the bathroom? Then somebody said to me: “Every relationship you have is the first one either of you have had in that relationship. It’s a unique one, and there are no rules.” That advice allowed me to relax. It was surprisingly easy.

Fry with his husband, Elliott Spencer.Credit: Getty Images

Q: You started out in comedy and gradually moved toward more “serious” pursuits. But I still wonder: do you think comedy has any access to truth that, say, literature and philosophy don’t?

A: Nearly always. Comedy follows the particular rather than the general. It distrusts abstract statements and therefore distrusts philosophical statements. Woody Allen is a perfect example of that when he said, “Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.” You test grand ideas against reality, and one of the results is often comedy.

You know, one of my favourite moments in cinema is the end of Sullivan’s Travels, when Joel McCrea says laughter may not be much, but it’s all some people have in this cockeyed caravan. I genuinely think that laughter is not only enough, it is what is needed, and it saddens me that it is a young person’s game.

Q: What’s the funniest thing that you’ve ever heard someone say?

A: Ridley Scott seemed to think that I might play this instructor in his film Gladiator so I went to see him for a screen test. I had to imagine I was inspecting some slaves and how likely they were to be good gladiators. So he said, “Just march up and down proudly, maybe grab one of them between the legs and give it a twist to see how manly he is.” I’m thinking, “I’m Stephen Fry, a helpless old queen, let me pretend to be some wildly butch gladiator trainer?” Being asked to stalk up and down twisting potential gladiators was one of the weirdest things I’d ever heard a human being utter.

(At left) as the Master of Laketown in 2013’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.Credit: Alamy

Q: You said earlier that you’ve been reading philosophy. Is there a particular idea that you’re tickled by lately?
A: I suppose the real biggie is free will. I find it interesting that no one really talks about it: I would say that 98 per cent of all philosophers would agree with me that essentially free will is a myth. It doesn’t exist. That ought to be shocking news on the front of every newspaper. I’m not saying we don’t look both ways before we cross the road; we decide not to leave it to luck as to whether a car is going to hit us. Nor am I saying that we don’t have responsibility for our actions: we have agency over the body in which our minds and consciousness dwell. But we can’t choose our brains, we can’t choose our genes, we can’t choose our parents.

There’s so much. I mean, look at the acts of a sociopath, which are performed with absolute will in the sense that he means to do what he’s doing, but he’s doing it because he has desires and impulses which he didn’t choose to have. Nobody elects to be a sociopath. The difference between us and them is one of degree. That certainly interests me.

But, generally speaking, I suppose ethics is the most interesting. You do wonder if there are enough people in the world thinking about the consequences of artificial intelligence and technology.

Edited version of a story first published in The New York Times Magazine. It has been edited and condensed from two conversations. © 2021 The New York Times Company.

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