Rupert Everett - Oscar Wilde Biopic
The Magazine Interview: Rupert Everett tells Lynn Barber about his epic new Oscar Wilde biopic
“Nowadays, one wrong hand on the knee and you’re out”. Interview by Lynn Barber
As long as I’ve know Rupert Everett, he’s been saying he wants to make a film about Oscar Wilde. But it became sort of conversational wallpaper: he never seemed to get any nearer to making it. Now, finally, he has. It is called The Happy Prince (after a children’s story Wilde wrote for his sons) and is about the three years Wilde spent in exile between his release from Reading Gaol and his death. Of course, Oscar Wilde is the part Everett was born to play, but the whole film is rich and moving, beautifully shot, beautifully acted, a real labour of love. It is also a great team effort, because Everett, as a novice director, called in lots of old friends as supporting cast — Colin Firth, Emily Watson, Julian Wadham, Joshua McGuire, Béatrice Dalle (his last heterosexual love), John Standing, Tom Colley, Anna Chancellor, Tom Wilkinson. He says they made his job as director much easier: “Obviously without all of them it would have been hopeless.”
After the screening, he invites me to tea at his Bloomsbury flat, and serves it immaculately in an antique tea service. His home is gorgeous, consisting of huge panelled rooms in an 18th-century house. He bought it 20 years ago, when it was still divided into tiny bedsits, and did it up in his own “Moroccan baroque” style. The place is so seductive, I keep straying off to look at things — piles of art books, a row of skull-shaped candles, Islamic bowls and the Grierson award he won for his documentary about prostitution. There are big aluminium trunks on top of all the cupboards where he keeps papers, and an astonishing array of travelling bags and suitcases — he is never in one place for long. He shows me his gay porn collection in the bathroom, and the Indian miniatures given to him by his father in the bedroom. But, although there is stuff everywhere, the flat feels orderly. I notice that, when I pick up a handbell saying “Ring for a F***” (given to him by his friend Katie Price), he replaces it exactly, to the millimetre, where it was before. Is he a bit of a neat freak? “I am now. I don’t like untidiness.”
So we lie back on his enormous sofa and he talks about how he finally got to make The Happy Prince. He wrote the script 10 years ago and sent it to a top producer, Scott Rudin, who rang the next day and said he loved it. “I was walking on air all day. And then the following day he rang and said, ‘And I want Philip Seymour Hoffman to play Oscar.’ So, from being on top of the world, I was right down at the bottom again.”
He thinks the 10-year wait might actually have served him well, because “when I wrote the script, I was much younger and people said, ‘You’re too handsome to play Wilde.’ But that changed over the years, as time and failure took their toll.”
In fact, he is totally convincing as Wilde — not the sleek, perfumed Wilde of his Café Royal years, but the flabby, lumbering, drooling wreck he became in exile. I was impressed that Everett was willing to demolish his own looks to such an extent (wearing a fat suit and greasy wigs), because he used to be vain, but he says: “Part of my love of Oscar was this idea of him as a toothless vagrant, smelling vaguely of piss and sweat and cigarettes, so I wanted to be that as much as I could. And after a certain age, trying to look good brings diminishing returns!”
There is one scene in the film, though, where he looks young and handsome again, in a flashback of Wilde in his heyday telling his sons the story of The Happy Prince. That was all thanks to brilliant Italian make-up artists. “They put things in your hair to pull your flesh up, and they have these special creams, like Preparation H, that tighten you up. And then you shoot it all from above, so you look thinner and more gaunt. I was quite pleased with that.”
Is it true that, in real life, he injects himself with his own blood? “I can’t do it any more, but I used to. Blood is the thing, really. What you want are blood slaves. If you’re a rich person, you have your slave, who is the same blood group as you, living up in the mountains, running nonstop, and sending his highly oxygenated blood back down the mountain. Then you pump it into your face or your bum and it gives you a huge lift.”
Would he be up for that? “I’m up for anything — not blood injections so much, but anything to do with feeling more energetic and more focused. I’ve found a new thing, hyperbaric oxygen — it’s like a Michael Jackson tank you get into and it pumps you full of oxygen. And, really, it is amazing — your brain becomes sharper and sharper.” Has he got one in the flat? “No, it’s in Mayfair.”
I have interrupted his narrative of making the film. He spent years trying to raise the money — he was aiming for €l4.5m, though had to make do with €11m. He was heartbroken when the BFI refused to give him seed money: “I felt my whole career had meant nothing.” He got some German investors interested, but they kept asking, “What’s your English deal?” and he’d have to fudge it and say “Er”. So then he had the idea of putting on The Judas Kiss (David Hare’s play about Wilde) in the theatre, so at least he could prove that he was a credible Wilde. The play got excellent reviews and achieved the desired result, because it led to two start-up deals, from Lionsgate and the BBC, so it all began to come together.
The next step was to find a director, and Scott Rudin gave him a list of six possibles. “That’s when I came to understand what it’s like being on the other side of the mirror, because it took me two years to get a ‘No’ out of the six people I approached. And at that point I was left with just the script, and a script on its own is nothing. I was so depressed, so I thought, ‘F*** it, I’m going to try to direct it myself.’ Not really knowing how difficult that would be — I don’t think I’d have done it if I’d known.”
All his financing deals were conditional on Colin Firth being in the movie — he was the only big box-office name. Frothy, as Everett calls him, had agreed to do it as soon as Everett sent him the script — “I thought it was one of the best scripts I’d ever read,” Firth says — and stuck with him all those years. What’s odd is that his part, as Wilde’s friend Reggie Turner, is really quite minor and could have been played by any number of actors, but Firth’s name was crucial to the money men. “He did it as a favour to me and I’m eternally grateful.” (Gratitude is a new talent Everett seems to have acquired in middle age — as a young man he was famously ungrateful.)
He and Firth had known each other ever since filming Another Country in l984, but Everett wrote in his memoir Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins: “At first I quite fancied him, until he produced his guitar and began to sing protest songs,” dismissing him as a “grim Guardian reader in sandals”. But 20 years later they worked together again on The Importance of Being Earnest and became good friends. Everett persuaded Frothy to smoke a joint, which he never normally did, and just at that moment Harvey Weinstein walked into their trailer with a gang of executives. Frothy tried to hand the joint back, but Everett said, in his most understanding voice: “I’d love to another time, but I just can’t do it while I’m working. I wish I could. I’m so envious that you can get high and still work!” Luckily, Frothy forgave him and came on board for The Happy Prince. There was just one moment when Livia, Frothy’s wife, rang Everett and said he had to pull out because he’d got such a great film offer, but Everett said he’d kill him if he did, so he stayed. “That act of friendship was way beyond what he ever needed to do for me, because it’s quite a responsibility to hold someone’s film in your hands. I’ll never really be able to pay him back.”
Even finding locations was difficult. Wilde spent his exile in France, but France wasn’t putting up any money, whereas the German investors insisted on 50% of the film being shot in Bavaria. Eventually, Everett found some run-down castles near Bayreuth (he actually stayed in Hitler’s hotel bedroom), which he could use for interiors, and he shot most of the exteriors in Belgium. “But I had to disguise them with mist or snow because the buildings looked slightly Flemish. My main sources of inspiration, actually, were Brassaï photographs of Paris in the fog, and I just thought, ‘Oh, I’ll make it in a peasouper.’”
They finished shooting in December 2016, edited it till July and started showing it at festivals — Sundance and Berlin, though Venice wouldn’t take it. It got rave reviews in The Guardian and The Times, but Variety said that while Everett’s acting was great, his film making was “indulgent and somewhat undernourished”.
“That was very irritating,” he says, “because Variety is important. But still, we got American distribution.” He slightly wishes now that he’d made it as a TV series, so he could have had more flashbacks. He believes it is more truthful than all the previous Wilde films, because they made him out to be a saint. “And I don’t think he was a saint. What appeals to me about him is that when he became famous, he became a kind of monster, as people often do. When he started that mental court case [suing the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel, which led to his own prosecution for gross indecency], he told his lawyer, ‘Don’t worry, the working classes are behind me, to a boy.’ It’s that kind of fatal arrogance that stars get when they think the world is only operating around them, because they can’t see outside their bubble. Until recently, all the films treated him with kid gloves, because you had to be respectful to deal with the subject at all. But the times have moved on, and now we can afford to look at him in a more realistic light. I think what’s lovely about him is his human failing. He was a snob, apart from anything — the great love affair with Bosie was an act of snobbery.”
Is he still obsessed with Wilde? “No, I’m out of it. I’m now obsessed with the Indian Mutiny.” He points to a stack of books on the subject next to his computer. Why? “I’m interested in the mindset of these people who had to walk into waves of bullets and have their legs cut off. I mean, we couldn’t do it, it’s unimaginable. We’ve all become more inward-looking — this notion of ‘How am I feeling?’ and ending with Facebook. It’s disastrous because it means we’re totally self-obsessed.”
Anyway, now he’s off to Rome, filming an eight-part TV series of The Name of the Rose. He has just signed with the Hollywood agency CAA, which suggests that his rollercoaster film career might be on the up again. It started well with Another Country, but crashed three years later, in 1987, when he made Hearts of Fire with Bob Dylan and tried to launch himself as a pop singer, to universal derision. So then he moved to France, became a face of the fragrance Opium Pour Homme, and wrote a couple of hilariously camp novels called Hello Darling, Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St Tropez. His film career seemed to be petering out when he was given what was meant to be a small supporting role in My Best Friend’s Wedding with Julia Roberts in l997. He made the part much bigger and totally stole the film. Suddenly Hollywood couldn’t get enough of him, and offers were flowing in from all directions. But then, three years later, he made The Next Best Thing with Madonna, which attracted every Rotten Tomato going — one critic wrote that “Rupert Everett’s performance has all the energy of a pet rock” — and his last Hollywood film wasn’t even released.
So he slunk back to England and wrote the best showbiz memoir I have ever read, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins (2006). His follow-up, Vanished Years, in 2012, is less glittering but more moving, especially when he writes about his parents and taking his dying father to Lourdes. I almost wish he would give up acting and just write, but he won’t. He says it’s too lonely. “When you’re used to working in a commune, which acting is, where all you have to do on your own is set the alarm clock and learn your lines, being alone in front of the typewriter is completely alien.”
At least he has embarked on a third volume of memoirs, which he is supposed to finish this year. Writing, though, is faute de mieux: what he mainly hopes is that The Happy Prince will reignite his film acting career. “If you can make it into the 60-year-old star bracket [he is 58], there’s always a broomstick available somewhere and next minute you’re Dumbledore! I can’t go on having all these ups and downs, because once you get too old, you’re like a bicycle without brake pads for the downhill bits. I’d like to be more established.”
The other great change in his life is that he is in the process of moving to Wiltshire, to live with his 83-year-old mother. Is that wise? “Well, we’ll have to see. She’s a very tough cookie, and she likes everything her own way, as do I, but we’ll have separate quarters and make rules about how often we meet — she can come to me for dinner once a week and I’ll go to her. I’m hoping it will be successful.” But he loves going to restaurants and hates dinner parties; how will he endure country social life? “I quite like it. I know the people she plays bridge with and I like them a lot.” Presumably he is doing it so he can look after his mother in her old age? He concedes: “I think it will be easier to be near her than far away, because I found when my dad was ill, being in America and having to drop everything to come over was more stressful than it needed to be. Whereas if you’re close to someone, it’s going to be quite easy to be helpful when they get old.”
So what about Henrique, his boyfriend? He is a 38-year-old Brazilian accountant and they’ve lived together for 10 years. He has a job in London, so will stay in the flat and come down to Wiltshire at weekends. “I don’t know if he’ll like the English countryside very much.” But surely, if he leaves Henrique alone in town, he’ll go off with someone else? “Well, all relationships have danger moments, don’t they? And you could be driven mad by being with someone all the time. It’s claustrophobic. For me, relationships only work if you have enough distance and freedom.” He got in trouble for saying he disliked the idea of gay marriage, but he explains that it’s all marriage he dislikes — he thinks once you set a relationship in aspic, it’s dead.
I remind him that when I interviewed him eight years ago, he told me he’d given up sex entirely. “No, I haven’t become a monk! I meant random sex. I used to be a sex maniac, and that really did stop overnight, when I was about 50. Thank God, because, nowadays, one wrong hand on the knee and you’re out. I think what I probably meant to say was that the allure of men in general, that need to conquer other people, just stopped for me.” But if he sees a really beautiful young man? “I can’t think of anything worse than having to take him out to dinner and try to get to first base. I would rather, if anything, watch him through a keyhole, see what he’s doing. That fascination with sex, I think I did so much of it, I kind of OD’d.” Was he the pursuer or the pursued? “Oh, always pursuing. I was so tall and thin and weird-looking, nobody fancied me, or not the people I fancied anyway. I did have a nice face, but at 6ft 5in and beyond size zero, I think I was quite alarming.”
If, as a child, he’d been asked what gender he wanted to be, what would he have said? “A girl, definitely. I’d love to have gone to a girls’ school instead of a boys’ school [Ampleforth]. But my family would never have given me the opportunity. They didn’t mind me cavorting around in a skirt, they were fine with a certain amount of weirdness, but they didn’t want words put on it. And if I had been a girl at school, I would never have been me. At school, I played all the girls’ parts and then I loved being a girl. But I don’t think I wanted to be a girl after I left school, because then I loved being a homosexual man.”
He thinks being gay was much more exciting in those days. “When I started coming out, in l976, it was only nine years since legalisation had happened, and the police didn’t really take it seriously. And the law was so peculiar that places like the Gigolo Club were still being raided constantly. If you snogged in a nightclub, they could close the nightclub down. So it really felt that you were still walking in the footsteps of Wilde.” But he liked that, he relished the whiff of danger. “My generation adored the illegality. You were part of a weird underworld, and you counted for taking part in it, because it had risks. Obviously that’s all gone, quite rightly, but it was exciting. One of the things that went wrong for me in life is that it does make you feel outside the structure of society, and you tend to have a combative frame of mind towards everything, which I think didn’t necessarily help me all the way through.”
“One of the things that went wrong for me in life” — he always talks like this, as if his life has been a failure. Yet he is an acclaimed actor, an acclaimed writer. True, he’s had some knocks along the way, but he always bounces back. He sighs. “But the ups and the downs ... the downs are difficult to come up from. Because the thing about glossy careers like showbiz is that the world tends to zip up behind you and it’s difficult to re-enter. But that’s been the thing that’s been most fertilising for me in a way — having to make that effort always to get back.” He regrets the fact that when he was, briefly, a Hollywood star, he messed up the opportunities he was given. “I’ve only discovered tenacity now, when it’s too late.” It’s not too late — and I hope The Happy Prince wins him the Oscar he so richly deserves.
The Happy Prince is out on June 15
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