My wild days of sex and drugs and being mates with Madonna are over

The Herald Scotland

15-06-2025

He's up before six in the morning and in bed with the light off before 10 at night.
'I feel a totally different animal certainly, now,' he tells me as we sit together in a plush room in Ayrshire.
He looks well on it. But then he always did. When he first started appearing on our screens in the early 1980s - in films like Another Country and Dance With a Stranger - he was clearly pin-up material for girls and guys who liked the floppy-fringed posh boy archetype.
Actually, he thinks otherwise. 'I wasn't that handsome,' he says when I suggest as much. 'I was 6ft 5in, a beanpole. I was odd looking as well.
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'I took a very good picture,' he concedes, 'I was photogenic. But if you saw me in the street I was weird looking.
'I was pretty in a way, but I didn't feel very pretty and my vanity was not the vanity of thinking I was good looking. It was an inverted vanity of trying always to look more like a normal man.'
I've read that he tries not to look in the mirror now. 'Never if I can help it,' he admits. 'It's like sex. I looked in the mirror for so long it got boring.'
It's early May, a Friday, and Everett and I are at Dumfries House, near Cumnock. He's here to appear at the Boswell Book Festival later this evening. (If you've never been, do go. It's a great festival.)
Everett has come to talk about his latest book, The American No, a fine collection of short stories that is an enjoyable reminder that he's always been at least as good a writer as he is an actor.
Not that he thinks so. 'I'm not particularly proud of being either at the moment,' he tells me. 'They're both a work in progress, really. But I find being an actor much more enjoyable. Let's put it that way. Being a writer is a headf***, don't you find?'
Acting is communal, he adds, and that's some consolation. You can at least share your misery. In writing that misery is yours alone.
'Don't get me wrong; to be a writer and to have a second thing to do - particularly as you get older and the jobs don't come along with the same regularity - it's an amazing gift.'
But, he says, it can seem like hard work at times. 'I would love to be able to come up with something less laboriously.'
Rupert Everett in Vortex at the Citizens Theatre in 1988 (Image: unknown) He's trying to work out how. 'I'd just like to have something like hypnotism to break through some kind of threshold. I think I could break through some kind of threshold.
'Writing my latest book I've stopped drinking and taking marijuana oil, which has been my staple for years, just to see if it's not the up and down of being jolly in the evening and feeling grumpy in the morning that is stopping me from being able to do it.
When you say 'stopped, Rupert …?
'Stopped,' he says with some finality.
And how are you finding it?
'Fine, actually. I'm sleeping better than I used to, which is good, and I feel that my brain mist is to a certain extent lifting.'
But older is older, he says. He's now in his mid-sixties (he'll say he's both 65 and 67 in our time together I think he's 66. His birthday is at the end of May).
'Obviously I suppose one gets a bit slower. And it's weird with words and names and things like that. They're locked in little bubbles underground and sometimes they take a while to come up.'
Life today is mostly rural. He spends his time in the English countryside with his labrador and his spaniel, a rescue dog, and his mother. 'She is mute. She has dementia. She just sits. I look after her, which I quite enjoy, and that's it.'
At the weekends his husband Henrique will come down from London - or sometimes he'll go up to the city. He still has a place there but doesn't visit it often. 'I've become a country blob,' he says. He's content with this development.
'I've become much more, I suppose, conservative as I've got older. Alan Bennett said everyone did. Well, I did, definitely.'
In many ways he has now conformed to the world he grew up in. His father was a Major in the British Army. His grandfather, on his mother's side, was a Vice-Admiral in the Royal Navy.
'I think I came from a very particular collapse-of-empire family. It was very military, very frosty, very unemotional - all the things I really admire now by the way - and I felt that life was meant to be something completely different.
Rupert Everett at the Citizen's Theatre before its renovation (Image: Mark F Gibson) 'Like everyone in our generation I felt that life was meant to be more emotional, more straightforward, more confrontational. I rejected everything that they stood for.
'I felt that sexuality was liberation. I felt that f****** everyone was somehow my way out of the background I was in, out of the prison I felt I was in. Actually, it was just another kind of prison in a way.
'And now that we've become what I wanted us to be all those years ago I really hate it because I think we're way too emotional. I really respect people who don't show too much feeling all the time. I'm so sick of people bursting into tears on television.
'I think we've completely lost the way; both sides of the border by the way. We've got what I dreamt was going to happen and it looks to me like a mess.'
Has he turned into his father, I wonder? 'Umm … I understand him so much more. I definitely do. He was so careful about money and turning lights off and freezing cold rooms - all the things that we just gave up on after that generation. I now think freezing cold houses are nice. I like freezing cold houses with one warm room.'
I think central heating is a good thing on the whole, I tell him. 'But central heating is like being a lettuce. You feel yourself wilting.'
Born in 1959, Everett had the typical childhood of the British upper classes; packed off to prep school at an early age. It was to shape who he would become.
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'The reason I became an actor is because I became a terrible show-off as soon as I got to school. My way of dealing with the terror you have of other boys en masse, all together, running around screaming, hitting you if you were too wimpy.
'My way - without understanding quite what I was doing - was to become a kind of class pest and show-off, whereas before I'd been an incredibly quiet, reclusive child. I used to like hiding in cupboards, for example, and doing fun things like watching dust particles.'
Hmm, I say, weren't you already cross-dressing even before you went to public school?
'I was cross-dressing. I really thought I was a girl. School changed all that, so I think it had a huge effect on me. It made me into just a show-off really. A show-off on the one hand. And I broke down like a little girl on the other. I found those two qualities have kind of gelled into the person I am in a way. They're both not quite who I feel I really am. So It's taken me years to work through them.'
He paints a portrait of the British prep school as a form of continuous conflict. 'The fallout from the war was so funny in the British prep school. All the teachers were basically people who had been in Burma or in India or in the war and had wooden legs from being blown up. They weren't really teachers in the ordinary sense of the world. They used to get into terrible tempers which I think was what we now call PTSD.
'I don't regret any of it because I think the only resilience I did have came from that Spartan type of education. Because those schools in those days were much more rigorous than they are now. They were tough places. They weren't comfortable.'
He left to go to London at the age of 15. 'I was allowed to go and rent a room from a family and that's when I really discovered myself and became a kind of sex maniac.'
Everett now seems very distant from the young man he once was. 'I don't recognise myself,' he admits.
Rupert Everett with Julia Robert's in My Best Friend's Wedding (Image: unknown) His younger self certainly embraced the hedonistic lifestyle - 'showbusiness was my cruising ground,' he suggests - but he also worked too. He won a part in Julian Mitchell's stage play Another Country and then turned up in the film version too, alongside Colin Firth. He also spent formative years in Glasgow working at the Citizens Theatre.
For a while he even tried to be a pop star, but that didn't work out.
Still, he has often said, sex was the driving force for him in his twenties. He was a gay man, but he had affairs with women such as Paula Yates and Beatrice Dalle, the star of Betty Blue. What were you getting from those relationships, Rupert?
'Attention. And you know being turned on by people and turning people on. That was all I really cared about. I think the tragedy of my career - if it has been one - is that it was really all about that. I should have been more serious about it.'
Plus, he points out, 'my gayness was very self-loathing too. It was very wrapped up in my Catholicism and my non-acceptance of myself. So, it took me years to be in relationships with men. It was easier for me to be in a relationship with women.'
Did the women you went out with know you were gay?
'Yeah, no one really cared in those days. Anyway, you're only gay when you're gay. I don't think it's that big of a deal. I always loved girls liking me because they were so attentive. Much more attentive than men.
'If you went out with a guy they'd go off to the loo and meet someone else. When you went out with a girl they were so lovely. They'd roll you little joints and make breakfast and dinner. I loved going out with girls. You got a full experience.'
He mentions Dalle. 'She was an amazing girlfriend. She would have killed for her guy. And in my gay world that was unknown really.
'All the girls I went out with were so committed. Guys, all of us, we were always looking over our shoulders at something else coming along.'
Careerwise, Everett was ambitious enough to go to America and try to make it in Hollywood in the 1980s. It was, he says, the most depressing period of his life, 'because I could never get on. And that was because, even though you very kindly said I was good looking, they just thought I looked like a freak. And the aesthetic in those days was much more Brut aftershave. Men with moustaches, hairy chests; big, proper men. So I was way out of the zeitgeist. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so I don't think I ever got a job in those days. I was there for years. I was so ambitious to become something I couldn't be.'
What did you want to be, Rupert?
'I wanted to be Tom Cruise. I wanted to be something I couldn't possibly have been, just from my physique. I looked like a wine bottle, one of those characters in Cluedo. So I was bashing myself against a brick wall every day in auditions and never getting anything. If I'd arrived in the late nineties I would probably have done very well. When the standards had changed for men. They were interested in gawkier, geekier, weirder types of people.'
Rupert Everett starred with Madonna (Image: free) If you had become Tom Cruise, I begin… 'I wouldn't have joined scientology.'
He did finally see some Hollywood success in the 1990s when he appeared in films like My Best Friend's Wedding, opposite Julia Roberts, and The Next Big Thing, alongside Madonna. But now he is in his sixties roles are sparser. He made his directorial debut with The Happy Prince in 2018, a biographical film about Oscar Wilde which he also wrote and starred in. He has other projects he would love to make but he is not confident he will ever be allowed to. 'Films aren't happening. They're just not happening.
'People aren't going to the cinema. The pandemic knocked everything on the head. You've got to hope it's going to come back, but it's probably not going to come back to the kind of things I like.'
Still, he is not unhappy. 'In general I feel incredibly lucky. I've got a bit of money, I've got a nice home. I'm married. I have a husband.'
As for the world, though, well, let's just say he's not optimistic.
'I feel very concerned about our country and the world, so I don't feel that good, no. And also I feel impotent in the sense that it's too late. I don't know what you can really do, aged 65? No one really listens to anyone. What would you say? But I never imagined I could care much about how things are going but I find now that as I get older …'
You're ranting at the radio? 'I'm not ranting. I decided at the last election never to vote again.'
Did you vote in that one?
'No. I decided if no one ever mentioned Brexit on either side I wasn't going to vote for any of them and now I'm never voting for anything ever again.
'They're all useless. Useless people. Useless ideas and everything going so badly I don't see who is going to pull us out of the hole we've dug for ourselves'
He thinks for a moment. 'I guess when you're younger you're busy doing things more, so you don't notice.'
Maybe this is a good time to talk about death. He has often spoken about it in the past. Now I wonder as it comes closer (for both of us) as a consequence of time passing is he nervous, afraid?
'I think death is easy. It's being ill that's not easy. Death itself … I don't want to drown very much and I don't want to die from not being able to breathe and, God, I have so many friends now who are going through chemotherapy … I don't know what I would do if I develop cancer.'
But the idea of not being here doesn't bother you? We live in a world where billionaires want to move to Mars and live forever, after all.
'I don't want to go to Mars. I think Elon Musk can go to Mars and Harry and Meghan can be the king and queen of the crown Nebula. And everyone can pay 10 million dollars a shot for a pod up there.
'That's not for me. I think one of the great things is disappearing. And showbusiness, funnily enough, prepares you for death. Because you die so often in showbusiness and you have many different ways of dealing with your career deaths.
'I'm not afraid of not being here. I love the idea of not being here. And anyway our consciousness is something - it doesn't stay around as you or me - but it's part of some whole. An intelligence.'
Of course Everett will live on in his films and books. Does he ever watch any of his own movies? He is horrified by the very idea. It also reminds him of a story.
'One of my agents once lived in a flat opposite Bette Davis and one day he said, 'You've got to come over.' Now Voyager was on television, on Turner Classics. We could see her watching it in her flat and that was kind of amazing.'
These days Rupert Everett is not drinking. These days Rupert Everett is not a sex maniac. These days Rupert Everett is staying at home and reading a book. If we're lucky he might even write one or two more of his own.
The American No by Rupert Everett is published by Abacus Books