Rupert Everett

The book is full of inspiring ideas; some riff on Oscar Wilde – a perennial subject of fascination for Everett, who adapted the author’s book ‘The Happy Prince’ for his acclaimed directorial debut – while others are expansive, catty capturings of Hollywood bureaucracy, and the people who stop at nothing to succeed. The stories share little thematic interlinking but are tied together by Everett’s unmistakably wry prose and his ability to write as if he were a spectre in the corner of the room, spitting his humour into it. It has done very well with critics. Reviews in ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Times Literary Supplement’ and more pick up on the particular spiky yet enjoyable tone. The words “failure,” “fatalistic” and “out of sync with time” come up, but in a good way. “We are all the luckier for it,” says Hadley Freeman, writing in ‘The Times’.

Everett is a survivor of Hollywood. After his ascent in British theatre and cinema, by way of 1984’s ‘Another Country’ and Mike Newell’s 1985 film ‘Dance with a Stranger’, he spent much of the next decade in America. (Around the same time, Everett embarked on a six-year on-off affair with the television presenter Paula Yates, one of his few forays into heterosexuality. Yates was in a relationship with Bob Geldof at the time.) Over in the States, directors like Paul Schrader and Robert Altman called upon him to appear in some of their more strange and sadistic work. In Schrader’s ‘The Comfort of Strangers’, Everett appeared opposite the late Natasha Richardson. The pair played a couple stalked through the streets of Venice by a man with an ulterior motive. For Altman, Everett was the son of a style mogul’s mistress in the large ensemble of ‘Prêt-à-Porter’, a kitschy, gossipy film about Paris Fashion Week. In both films, he played straight men.

If Hollywood wasn’t overly kind to gay actors, in the late ’90s it seemed more willing to embrace the gay side character, whom Everett played with gusto and charm. Throughout our meeting in the cafe, we are left alone downstairs. Rupert sips a £4.50 cappuccino, his dogs lying patiently on the floor. To this day, he tells me – with such straightforwardness it’s as if there could be no other answer – the film most people fawn over when they meet him is ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’.

The romantic comedy he made with Julia Roberts in 1997 was his starmaker, earning him his first Golden Globe nomination. His success played a big part in getting ‘The Next Best Thing’ green-lit. The Madonna-starring, sexuality-twisting film about a straight girl accidentally carrying the child of her gay best friend bombed with critics and at the box office. The tumultuous experience “turned my pubic hair white overnight,” as he wrote in his 2006 memoir, ‘Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins’. Eventually, the film made its money back when it hit home video, and it now harbours a reputation as a schlocky, pleasurable watch, as anything Madonna touches tends to.

More than two decades later, in 2022, he’d make another film with a pop-star-turned-actor: the gay 1950s period drama ‘My Policeman’ with Harry Styles. It too was coolly received by critics, but “we all had a great time doing it,” Everett recalls. He reminds me that they shared only one scene, in the film’s finale: a magical-realist meeting between the two central male characters – Styles playing a policeman, Everett his lover – decades in the future. Nevertheless, he has fond memories of the time they spent together on the film’s press tour. He remembers Styles as being “a very nice guy – polite, well mannered – and very serious about his work.”

Back in the early 2000s, though, Everett felt like the bubble had burst and decided to leave America behind and move back to London, into the Bloomsbury home he still keeps to this day, alongside his family home in Wiltshire. “It was after 9/11, and the world started to shift very fast,” he says of his escape. He doesn’t return to Hollywood all that often.

Rupert says he “works a little” as an actor these days, only “when I can.” Indeed, he seems to be much busier as an author and director. Nonetheless, he did ask legendary showrunner Darren Star for a part in the latest season of Netflix’s ‘Emily in Paris’. As the flamboyant Italian interior designer Giorgio Barbieri, he appears opposite French actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, who plays the titular character’s fabulously bitchy boss. His IMDb profile also currently suggests that he has ten forthcoming projects, five of which have wrapped shooting. The latter are, in alphabetical order:

But he has a long history in the fashion world. When he was living stateside, Rupert found himself staying for a time in the upmarket Miami neighbourhood of South Beach. Figures who would pass by included Linda Evangelista, Thierry Mugler and, most significantly, Gianni Versace. The early ’90s were a turning point for Miami, Everett wrote in ‘Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins’, and Versace’s presence played a part. As Everett puts it: “Gianni had presided over South Beach like a household god in his mausoleum.”

At the time, fashion houses were just starting to understand the cultural cachet that could be gained by dressing stars for red carpets, inviting them to their shows and casting them in their campaigns. Everett was at the centre of it all. “It was fun, going to Milan, going to Paris, and stuff like that. The circus of it was more fun than the fashion,” he tells me. There is a particularly good shot of him at a 1995 Versace party with Helena Bonham Carter, in which he wears a translucent short-sleeved patterned shirt from the Italian label. He has mostly left the fashion world behind, although he still maintains a friendship with Gianni’s equally famous sister Donatella.

Garments from his past have gotten lost over time or now “have holes in them.” Though there’s one special item he holds on to: the orchid silk robe he wore in his 1996 fragrance campaign for Opium by Yves Saint Laurent.

The conversation is fun and revealing, and also weirdly reminiscent of our own 20 years on. He talks about acting as something he has an odd relationship to. About doing things largely for the money and being a gun for hire. (While talking to Blanks he mentions a delayed trip to open a supermarket in Las Palmas for cash.) There’s the same odd disconnect between his self-deprecating description of his struggles as an actor and his ownership of multiple properties of considerable size and desirability. The same frankness and acerbic wit. “Just write something fabulous and glamorous,” he tells Blanks.