Hollywood shunning gays for straight roles ‘patronising and insulting’ says star

British actor Rupert Everett says young gay actors are still faced with the same roadblocks he encountered when he first started in the business

• Fan theories close to solving The OA secrets
• Sex scandal cost author name and social standing

Rupert Everett is angry that straight actors who play gay roles are lauded for their “braveness”, but gay actors are still shunned from playing a straight leading man.

The British actor, who makes his directorial debut in The Happy Prince, a biopic about the tragic last weeks of Irish poet Oscar Wilde’s life, is frustrated that young gay actors are still faced with the same roadblocks he was when he first started in the business.

Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince.

Everett, 59, has always been open about his sexuality but believes it cost him jobs playing straight characters. While he acknowledges there has been some positive movement over the years, he is still frustrated by the fact that straight actors are often called upon to play gay characters but the reverse is still a rarity.

MORE STORIES FROM DAVID MEDDOWS

WHY YOU NEED TO CATCH UP ON BIG LITTLE LIES BEFORE SEASON 2

WHY SCANDAL IS ONE OF THE BEST POLITICAL TV SHOWS IN THIS ERA

“The fact of the matter is it’s still very biased in the other direction,” Everett, best remembered by many as Julia Roberts’ gay best friend in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), tells Insider. “Sean Penn is called courageous and wins tons of awards for imagining he’s a passive homosexual (in biopic Milk, 2008), but it just doesn’t work out the other way and
I think that is the thing that is the most frustrating on the whole for gay actors.”

Merit should be the key driver for a show’s casting and being excluded for one’s sexuality is horrible and degrading, Everett says.

“If you’re a good actor you should be able to act and this notion that a straight actor can absolutely at the drop of a hat access their ‘inner bottom’, but gay actors couldn’t possibly imagine making love to a woman is really the nub of the problem,” he says. “It’s patronising and reductive and insulting, really.”

Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding.

When he landed his first straight lead role in a movie early in his career, the director was so concerned he couldn’t pull it off, he badgered Everett to basically prove himself throughout. It was a defining moment that helped unleash a rebellious side that saw him labelled as “difficult” for a period of time.

“I felt that the director just kept on being in my face trying to make me be able to prove that I could play the part and it was so irritating that I rebelled against him,” he says. “I was only 22 or 23 and it was an impossible situation and I did become very difficult and aggressive but I think it was all part of the same problem really — nobody believed I could play the role that I was playing.”

It was when he met lauded Australian director PJ Hogan on the set of My Best Friend’s Wedding that he finally settled down. He went on to a period of Hollywood success afterwards and when that waned he took smaller roles and also acted on stage.

Rupert Everett attends the unveiling of the newly renovated and protected tombstone of Oscar Wilde in Paris, on the 111th anniversary of the writer's death. Picture: Getty Images

Throughout his career, many had suggested to Everett that Wilde was a character he was born to play. He did on the stage, but eventually began the process of bringing the poet’s troubled dying weeks to life on the big screen.

After being jailed for homosexuality, Wilde fled into exile in France, where he died depressed and destitute at the age of just 46.

Not only are there a number of parallels between the two artists’ lives, but Everett also reveres Wilde as a hero of the modern LGBTI movement.

“Wilde is a sort of a Christ figure or patron saint and if I was ever going to make one movie that spoke for me, this would be it,” Everett says.

“He’s the beginning of modern homosexuality and I am (gay). Also he’s a homosexual working in show business and I’m one too and he had to deal with all the problems of that and I’ve had to deal with them too.”

Ensuring Wilde’s story was told right was paramount for the first-time director. He didn’t want the film to be just another period piece — a genre he believes can sometimes be lacking in creativity.

“There’s a whole attitude to period drama which can be quite depressing,” he says.

“It’s very conventional and it’s full of ghastly good taste and I wanted to have a more fly-on-the-wall version of the story and I didn’t just want to tell the A to Z of a dreary biopic.”

THE HAPPY PRINCE IS IN CINEMAS NOW