Why actor Rupert Everett told people he was Julie Andrews’ daughter
At 61, Rupert Everett has just completed his third memoir - and he’s still not afraid to speak candidly about the famous women he has worked with, his ruptured relationship with former friend and co-star Madonna or the fact he really wanted to be Julie Andrews when he grew up.
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At 61, Rupert Everett has just completed his third memoir - and he’s still not afraid to speak candidly about the famous women he has worked with, his ruptured relationship with former friend and co-star Madonna or the fact he really wanted to be Julie Andrews when he grew up.
My Best Friend’s Wedding put you on the Hollywood map playing the ultimate gay bestie. What are your memories of the film?
Fond memories, because that was one of two times in my life when everything was a road with green lights all the way. The start was inauspicious because [Aussie director] PJ Hogan didn’t want me for the role. He thought I was too obvious.
I had to do a screen test and then another. Then me and PJ just hit it off. I adored him and I think he adored me, and I got on very well with Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz, too. Everything fitted into place.
You then made The Next Best Thing with Madonna but it flopped.
Yes, it knocked my career on the head.
What became of your close friendship with Madonna?
We don’t see each other anymore. I do miss it. She’s an amazing person and that part of my life was incredibly exciting – to be doing a film with her and to be a friend of hers and to have been such a fan of hers. But the fallout from the movie’s failure was gigantic for me, like an outer-space explosion.
Where are currently based, and how has the COVID pandemic affected your life and livelihood?
I’m in England’s West Country. It’s quite warm and everything is kind of a disaster over here. I was on Broadway when COVID started, doing Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? It really was extraordinary. We’d done eight performances and in New York the army had just come in.
I was with my dog and we escaped to the Catskill Mountains, where I stayed for 10 weeks. I didn’t want to come back home in case I had the virus. An usher in our theatre was one of the first people officially to come down with it. So I didn’t come back to England until May. I’ve been very lucky because I had a lot of writing to do and I’ve been able to work from home.
You have just completed your third memoir To The End Of The World: Travels With Oscar Wilde, which tells the story of your exhaustive quest to make a movie about the last years of Wilde’s life. Do you now feel you know him?
Yes. I think by the end of the 10-year experience of trying to get him up on to the screen I felt I almost was him. Once you start sleuthing a character like Wilde, you really can follow him around street corners, and the further into it I got, the more I got to know him and the harder the film was to make. I was tested.
You talk about Wilde as your “Christ figure”. What do you mean?
I suppose having been brought up very Catholic and this whole notion – a brilliant notion, by the way – in Christianity of this semi-god who was sacrificed so that our sins could be forgiven, I’ve always seen Wilde in the same way because he was the first “out” homosexual, in that he was recognisable on the street.
He was famous, people could point at him and say, “Oh, that is a homosexual man” and a face was given to a rather shadowy idea. From that moment onwards, the road to gay liberation started and as he himself said, it’s going to be a long road and smeared with blood.
He died so that we could come to life. I came out on to the gay scene seven years after legality hit the homosexual world, so it’s very fresh still for someone of my generation. We all knew who Oscar Wilde was. It wasn’t something we took for granted.
When did you first know you wanted to be an actor?
It was an actress I wanted to be at first, at about the age of five when I saw Mary Poppins. I really wanted to be Julie Andrews’ daughter. I used to tell everyone at school that I was.
You recently said, “Genes drag you back to the beach of your youth”, and some years ago you moved back home to live with your mother. Was this your destiny?
I’m not sure. My family is like the last generations of Empire: no-one’s very clingy or needy. A lot of our family disappeared after childhood and didn’t come back.
I suppose I thought I was going to do that as well, but then life takes over. The thing that happened first was my dad got sick. I came home and started trying to help out, and then he died. I thought I should really try and make things work as best I can for my mum.
I didn’t ever expect to come back down here, but now that I am and we’re in the world of new Puritanism and COVID and Brexit, I feel good to be outside of London.
You’re 61 now. Do you mellow as you get older?
Totally. Much more mellow, but then also much more neurotic and easier to go off into queeny fits. I’m trying to work on that.
To The End Of The World: Travels With Oscar Wilde by Rupert Everett (Hachette, $34.99) is on sale on Tuesday.