Rupert Everett - 'Everyone is my Professional Nemesis'

0:00At Sierra, discover great deals on top brand workout gear, like high quality walking shoes, which might lead to another discovery. 40 ,000 steps, baby. Who's on top now, Karen? You've taken the office step challenge a step too far. Don't worry, though. Sierra also has yoga gear. It might be a good place to find your zen. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving.

0:36Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that firmly believes all failure can teach us something in the fullness of time. Before we meet our esteemed guest, just a quick heads up about our special bonus podcast. My guest stays on to answer your questions and we read out and offer advice on some of your failures too. This is part of our subscription called Failing With Friends, which also lets you hear my main episodes completely ad-free. Here's a little bit of today's guest, Rupert Everett. I think bearing a grudge is, she sounds rather fun, all their grudges. Do join in by following the link in the podcast notes and you can send me an email or look out for my call-outs once a month on Instagram for your shorter questions.

1:20And you can listen to How to Fail on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa, play How to Fail with Elizabeth Day on Amazon Music. The first film Rupert Everett saw in a cinema was Mary Poppins starring Julie Andrews. He was four and was so taken with both the movie and with Andrews that the experience would end up charting the course of his life. Or, as he put it in his memoir, Red Carpets and Banana Skins, a giant and deranged ego had been born. After being sent to boarding school at the age of seven, Everett left at 16 to attend the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He was asked to leave after teachers deemed him a bad influence and made his way to Glasgow where he cut his teeth at the Citizens Theatre.

2:08His big break was starring as a gay pupil at an English public school in the 1981 play Another Country opposite Kenneth Branagh. Three years later it was made into a film, a role that earned Everett his first BAFTA nomination. In 1989, Everett went public with his sexuality. It was a trailblazing move at a time when being a gay actor was seen as potentially career-ending. But a scene-stealing turn in My Best Friend's Wedding opposite Julia Roberts proved the naysayers wrong. He went on to appear in films including An Ideal Husband, St Trinian's, and more recently, Napoleon. He's also in the later season of Netflix's hit show, Emily in Paris.

2:52His credits give you some idea of Everett's quicksilver talent, one that is not just confined to acting. He has written five books, including three critically acclaimed memoirs. And this month, he returns with a new collection of short stories, The American No, based on all the pitches Everett has done for movies that never got picked up. Now, 65, he has said in the past that success has come to me both too early and too late. I would have preferred it to have come in the middle, in a more normal way. Rupert Everett, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you very much. What would have been a more normal way to experience success?

3:34Well, I think there's no normal way to experience success in a business as peculiar and as acid-trippish as show business, really. because it's so head-turning when it happens that it kind of catapults you up into the air and then you find you've got nowhere to stand, no ground beneath your feet. And the trouble with success is, for the most part, it's a rollercoaster. It goes up and it comes down. And it's quite often very difficult for people to change with the degree of success. You become the successful person, then you become a failure, but you want to stay the successful person. Everyone else is treating you as a failure.

4:17And then there's a conflict there. You have to really roll with the punches. And I think it teaches you quite a lot. It teaches you about death in a funny way because you have to die to what you were before. That's the only way of surviving success and its ensuing failure. If you go on acting like you're Elizabeth Taylor when you can't get a job, you'll be in constant conflict with everybody. So you have to cut your cloth according to how other people see you. And I think that's a very interesting thing about personality too, because it only exists in other people's eyes, really, what you are.

4:56And you have to be it. Otherwise, or you have to force them to make you believe in your version of things. It's complicated. Because you've also said that you feel you learnt the mechanics of fame too late, which I thought was a very interesting phrase. Yes, because I think it's almost impossible to learn the mechanics when you're young, you're seduced into success by, you know, partly luck, partly, probably a bit of talent. And then suddenly, once it's happened, your life becomes a kind of inverted glitter ball, where you have a company of your own goons, including your mother, who kind of are too afraid to say anything to you, or kind of charging on as a success.

5:35And the mechanics of it are that In fact, it's very fragile. And you have to keep watching it. You have to keep making diplomatic bridges with people, not burning them. And success kind of often encourages you to do the opposite. Why did you burn so many bridges? I don't know whether I burned so many bridges. I was just, I was a complicated young man. And I think I believe my own PR a little bit too much, you know, in a way. and so I took myself too seriously. I had a very good moment and it didn't really last. I wanted to go to America and I wanted to be in mainstream American films and just there wasn't a place for me as I was then.

6:21I was six foot four, size zero. I was very exotic for the world of that time. If you think about the early 80s and you look at, for example, perfume ads, They were all men with big handlebar moustaches and kind of hairy chests. And it was a very male, male world in the show business world. So I was much too much. I looked like a cross between Anne Frank and Snow White. And I was really, there wasn't a place that I could have inhabited. Later on, I came at the wrong time slightly, because if I'd been around at the end of the 90s, say, as a young person, the kind of thing that I could do was more applicable somehow.

7:06I'm very interested in people who get sent to boarding school at a young age. I got sent to boarding school myself at 10. I've just read Charles Spencer's book about the emotional cauterization of that. And given what you've gone on to do in your career, acting, writing, directing, a lot of that is about bringing emotion to the surface, to the screen, to making it understandable. Do you think that the way you've lived your life subsequent to being sent to boarding school is a sort of reaction to that quarterization? Boarding school was for me, it had bad things and good things. I think the actual moment of being separated from my mother was an extremely big kind of earthquake in my life.

7:52And I think that did precisely what boarding schools were meant to do, it does kind of cauterize, it calcifies your heart somehow. It makes it hard. And that's what they were designed for. They were designed for empire rulers to then go out and rule in the empire without so much emotional baggage. Of course, by the way, emotions weren't quite so popular when I was a kid as they are now. And I think in a way, we've gone too far with emotions. I'm so bored with everyone bursting into floods of tears nonstop at the drop of a hat. I rather respect the kind of world that I came from, which was one that held your emotions in.

8:32And I think for an actor, it's quite good not to have your emotions inside you and to have to really bore into yourself to get at them in a way. So talk to me about failure. Do you think you're friends with failure now? Because The American No is, in many ways, a book of failure, although I'm sure it'll be very successful. I think failure, for me, failure has always been the best motivation that I've ever had. Everything that's good that's happened to me in my life has really happened to me through failure on the whole. One of the most lucky things in a way that happened to me, I got a job to go to live in Russia for two years when I was about 34.

9:15And only because I just couldn't get arrested anywhere else, I took the job. and I think it was a life-changing thing for me being in Russia just before the collapse of communism and living there for so long. It saved me and it really fertilized something in me that took me on for another 15 years after that in a way. So I think failure is a great manure. Tell me more about Russia. What were you doing there? I got a job playing in a film directed by a very famous Russian director called Sergei Bondachuk. And he loved this book called Quiet Flows the Don by a man called Sholokov. And this book is a very, very famous book in post-revolutionary Russia.

10:00It was the only book about white Russia that Stalin allowed to be published. And actually, when you go down Russia, from about halfway down from Veronese onwards, everybody in their car has a picture of my character in this film, in their car. And he was a macho Cossack. And everybody in the show business world had been offered the part. And at the bottom of the list was me. And they all turned it down because in the Soviet system, there was only a start date to a film and never a stop date because they just went on until they finished. So everyone turned it down and I got the part. And it was the most extraordinary adventure I've ever been on.

10:44Very hard in a way. You know, I lived in a little flat in Moscow. There weren't shops there. We were there when it actually all ended. But it wasn't a comfortable place to live, really. But it was amazing. I really flourished in that place. And my prep school education stood me in very good stead to be able to enjoy it, I think. What was it like being a gay man in Russia? Well, worse being a gay man playing this part that everybody in Russia saw as their hero. And I think when the director found out that I was gay, it was worse for him than the end of communism, really. And he found out in a very strange way, because I brought with me from France this boy that I knew who could do cooking.

11:28and he was like a little tiny pixie and he had a collection of Barbie dolls which he brought with him to Russia and when I asked the directors for dinner the first time and Bondi Chuk was he he won artist of the Soviet Union twice uh you know he was he was the real the the big director he started Moss Film um he were he did War and Peace he did Waterloo he was a very important person. And when we arrived in my flat, the first thing I saw was a Barbie hanging from the kind of lampshade. And then I looked into the bathroom and sitting on the loo roll was another Barbie. And then on the sofa in the sitting room were five Barbies.

12:07And I was desperately trying to get rid of these Barbies as he came in. And I went into Bruno, who was doing the cooking in the kitchen. I said, what are you doing with all these Barbies? And he said, oh, relax, tell them they're mine. But when Bondachuk found out that I was gay, I think he was at first, you know, really very depressed, poor thing. You told me that anecdote because we were talking about failure. So do you categorize it in the failure realm? I would never have got that job if I hadn't been a failure. Right. Because I would just never have done it. I'd have been doing something fabulous, you know, in my fantasy, I'd have been doing risky business too in Hollywood or something instead, Instead, what I got was this job in Russia.

12:49For 19 months we were there. It was kind of the making of me through not having those other jobs. Do you speak Russian? I spoke a bit when I was there. I've forgotten it all now. It's very complicated. I learned Italian from it because our crew was Russian and Italian. And I was the only person who spoke English. So there was no language for me to speak. And Russian is very complicated. So I learned Italian mostly. Before we get on to your failures, I would love to ask you an incredibly cheery question. You said earlier that idea of being in movie jail, that idea of fame being removed from you is a kind of death.

13:32How do you feel about actual dying? Death, I think, is exciting. dying being sick going to the hospital having chemotherapy or you followed by immunotherapy followed by radiotherapy is really you know tough and that's a different thing I don't know how I feel about that because I you know I hate pain I hate feeling bad and I've I see so many people around me going through it I'm not a courageous person on the whole so I don't know how I would manage to deal with that side of things. Death itself is a thing to look forward to in one sense. You know, I feel very much now in this world, I'm completely out of my depth.

14:12I really don't anymore have a clue about anything. So in one sense, you do feel like a kind of pre-revolutionary character, tottering all the elves at the end of Lord of the Rings in the appendix when they're kind of left in Middle Earth and desperate to get the last train to the coast, like the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost in Don McLean's American Pie. So death, I think, is an excitement. Illness is the hard thing, I think. Do you feel sad about that lack of understanding, as you put it, of the world that we currently inhabit? I feel very sad about the impotence of old age in the world now because I don't think anyone's particularly interested in what an older person has to think about the world.

14:59You're sitting on the sidelines of what feels to me like a kind of collapse that's very upsetting. The way you write is so kinetic and waspish and funny and deep and all of the things. And it feels so youthful. It feels like you blaze through the world like a sort of whirling dervish. And I wonder, is that Rupert still in you? No, I don't think that Rupert is in me anymore. First of all, because that Rupert really didn't ever count the cost of anything. You know, we live in such a peculiar world for just speaking out and talking and saying your mind. You have to be very careful because everybody has become so emotional and emotionally charged.

15:46The grief that people cause by saying something they just think. I don't feel like charging through things now. Well, let's charge through your failures. Okay, we can charge through my failures. Your first failure is the making of The Happy Prince. So The Happy Prince was a film that you directed. You were very passionate about it. It's all about Oscar Wilde. The failure of it was what then happened to it once I presented it. It didn't work at the box office. And that then becomes a huge failure, because the only thing that works in show business is success. I think the film is a remarkable film.

16:22It's a wonderful film. The making of it was a wonderful experience. I mean, it's really tough. It took a long time to make. But show business is not a game for those who bleed easily. People don't really understand. You've got to have a robust and thick skin. So I wouldn't call the process of it a failure for me. No, the process of it was a great success. It's pretty well crafted, beautifully lit, designed, acted. It's a really compelling portrait of an artist, Oscar Wilde. It's very truthful. I think it was another thing rather like going to Russia, making it through it, managing to keep pushing and keep with an idea, which really before I'd never done and followed it through and followed it through to fruition.

17:11I think that was a great success for me because it's something I'd never done really before I'd given up on so many things all these stories in my book they're all quite good stories I gave up on them you know as soon as as soon as you face the first three or four rejections you think oh give up and of course that's not what you have to do do you think you were like that in relationships too I didn't ever want a relationship to go on for very long when I was young I always thought you I always thought there was something better around the corner. That was my trouble in relationships. I was very dodgy in relationships.

17:47When did you realize that maybe there wasn't anything better? It was that I didn't feel so restless with myself. Thinking there was something better wasn't really that I was thinking there was something better. I think it was growing into one's sexuality at that point when it was, you know, It was, after all, borderline illegal still when I came out as gay in the late 70s. It had only been legalized in, I think, 1967. And even after its legalization, the police kept on with their kind of raiding and arresting and stuff like that. So it didn't feel very legal. And I think coming to terms with that really was what made relationships become possible.

18:36so my feeling of there being something better somewhere else was really a feeling about myself not being able to deal with it I think that was so beautifully expressed and you've never been to therapy no thank god I'm not bored enough yet I might start now though this might be it this might be your single I wouldn't mind going to couples therapy on your own or no I think couples therapy is the one that really does sound like it makes a lot of sense because when you're in a couple, no one listens to what the other person is saying or they hear something completely different. I think personal therapy is not for me.

19:17I'd rather work it out myself. This restlessness that you talk about, how long do you think it took you to inhabit and feel all right inhabiting the fullness of who you were and are in terms of your sexuality? Well, it was connected with so many other things, my sexuality, because I loved also club culture, drug culture. I became a leather queen. And so there were lots of decoys that made it not necessary to really face yourself. because you can keep going for quite a long time doing all those things. And squeaking around in your full leather outfit, going to fabulous dungeons across Europe is enormous fun.

20:04And it means that you can put off facing yourself to a certain extent. I became more normal in a way in those kind of areas in my mid-40s, late 40s, I suppose. And, you know, I stayed a teenager really till the age of 50. That was a choice I made. And in terms of failure, I thought sexual liberty, being a highly charged sexual character, was somehow going to liberate me from a very kind of militaristic middle class background. and in one sense it did smash all that but in another sense it became in its own kind of prison and everything was related to that my whole career was really related to being attractive to some guy in the audience I could have done better at my work if I had concentrated harder on that rather than on trying to be some sexual being across the footlights and how much do you you think that's your failure and and how much is it a broader failure that Hollywood the industry that you were in wasn't ready for an out gay actor to play leading roles I think it's a bit of both what I wish for myself now for example I'm I'm I'm a fairly good stage actor I think I should have devoted more of my time to fine-tuning that and when I did it to being more serious when I I mean, I behaved incredibly badly several times when I was a West End actor.

21:42You know, you do long runs in plays in the West End. I did about four of those in my youth. And I behaved terribly badly in them. And it's a thing that I find now incomprehensible. It would be something I would never, ever do. In other words, I've now grown up and I regret, not that I didn't work hard, because I did work hard, but I didn't work hard in the right direction always. and it was always the slant of it was always presenting myself as this available sexual being and i think there was more to me and to the world than that the hollywood and everything like that that's another issue and yes that was always going to be difficult for me particularly with my physique you know i was six foot four i was uh incredibly thin i didn't actually look that good My face looked very good, but the whole of me together looked rather alarming, like an insane kind of giraffe character.

22:42You've got to fit in. You've got to eclipse with the world. And I didn't eclipse, really, with the world. I did, in a way. One of my other failures is I turned down the wrong types of jobs sometimes, too, because I was desperate not to just be upper class guy in a Merchant Ivory film. But I should have been, really. It would have been better.

23:08This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

23:34Lowe's knows how to help make your home holiday ready for less. Get Select Style Selections Vinyl Flooring for just$1.99 per square foot and have it installed before the festivities begin. Our team can help you every step of the way. See a Lowe's Red Vest Associate or visit lowes.com slash holiday install to get started. Lowe's. We help. You save. Basic install only. Date restrictions apply. Subject to availability. Install by independent contractors. See associate for details. contiguous us only do you have did you have any professional resentments or professional nemeses not when i was young much more now tell me who are they well everybody uh you know i'm you know you become as your when when i was young i was i always rather congratulated myself on never being jealous of anyone but it was basically because more or less i managed to keep my you know crazy train on the tracks somewhere.

24:34I always found a career somewhere. Now, when you're older, my whole generation of young floppy haired boys are now geriatrics and we're all clawing for the same part, some with more success than others. I won't mention any names, nor mine. So I feel more jealous now than I ever did when I was young. Returning to The Happy Prince, you have said in the past that you feel in communion with Oscar Wilde. Why is that? When you discover yourself sexually, you start looking for role models in that area. And obviously, Oscar Wilde was one of the first ones. And I think for me, as a Catholic, or as a lapsed Catholic, at least, which is kind of the same thing anyway, I think that Oscar Wilde is the Christ figure in the sense that he martyred himself for his sexuality.

25:32and rather like Christ, he died not so that our sins could be forgiven, but so that his death was really the beginning of the road to liberty. In other words, before Oscar Wilde, there was not a face to homosexuality. It wasn't even called homosexuality much, it was called being inverted, and it was something nobody talked about, certainly not a woman, and men only in strictest privacy. But once Oscar Wilde was flat-footedly kind of columping down the boulevard in France, you could point at him because he was famous and say, that is a homosexual man. And so it finally had a face. And I think his crucifixion at the hands of society is what bore the road to gay liberation.

26:19So he's a very important, he is a very important character for everything that's become LG, whatever, BTQ, all the other things. He's the 20th century beginning of that road, in a way, I think. Have you ever had a spiritual encounter with him? Has he ever come to you in your dreams, or have you ever spoken to him through a psychic? I did go and see one side. No, I definitely have a connection with him, and I became great friends with his grandson, and I feel a very peculiar a connection with him, Merlin. But I feel that if you really read a book with all your attention, it's rather like going to a seance.

27:00If you really attend to a book, you're summoning up the spirit of the writer. You're going back to the moment they thought up the lines. I felt that with a lot of books, actually, that I felt a connection with the writer, particularly Oscar Wilde. How guilty do you feel? I don't feel guilty anymore. I think I did feel guilty when I was younger, but you kind of run out of steam with guilt. It's so exhausting that after a bit, you just don't have the energy to keep feeling it, I think. And as one gets older, one of the great things about having less energy is you do have to discard things that are clunky.

27:38And I think guilt is one of them. It's a complete waste of time. What's the best drug you've ever taken? I don't know. I mean, I can't lie and say I haven't enjoyed lots of drugs. I don't regret my drugged days. What I do fear for is my own brain. And, you know, as I get older, I'd like to keep it as long as possible. And I can feel it going a little bit blurry at the edges already. And I think that could be partly to do with blitzing so much on, you know, nights taking 10 ecstasies in clubs and stuff like that, which is really not good for you. And that drug I don't enjoy, actually, looking back on it.

28:19I think it's difficult now, because now the only drug I like taking is gummies and marijuana oil, but mostly to sleep. And marijuana oil is quite good for glaucoma, which is an eye condition that I have. And I find that is a very nice drug. You don't have any of the problem of your lungs and smoking. But at the same time, really, now, I would like to be lucid. You're coming across as incredibly lucid. Well, good. I'm not very lucid, actually. But I want to be more lucid. The American No starts with an incident where you encounter a Hari Krishna, who was a former Hollywood producer. Is that true?

29:02Yes, it is. That's amazing. Well, it's a great way to start the book. Okay. Your second failure is, it's a failure around friendship. And as we know, the way that we deconstruct failure means it's not really a failure at all. It's just something that's a teaching experience. But I was thinking in particular of your friendships with iconic yet fragile women, with Paula Yates, with whom you had a six-year love affair and with Isabella Blow, and they sadly are no longer with us. And I wondered if at some level you felt, wrongly but understandably, that you had failed to save them. Isabella, I was in contact with a lot when she was waning.