Rupert Everett: Top of the Fops by Fiona Russell Powell

Blitz Magazine - March 1987

Since Another Country and Dance with a Stranger, the career of Rupert Everett has lain dormant, to say the least. However, this year he is not only set to appear in a spate of new films but is also about to embark on a new career - as a pop singer.

So, might we be seeing Rupert Everett on Top of the Pops later this year?

"You just think I'm a joke, don't you? Look at me, look into my face. I can see you can't take this seriously at all. You find the idea of me on Top of the Pops totally ludicrous, don't you?"

No, honestly Rupert, I don't make snap judgements like that. At least let me listen to your demo. Maybe I can form some sort of opinion then. I won't lie to you. If i don't like your music I'll tell you.
" I can't possibly do that. If I didn't, this situation would end badly and I don't want that. I couldn't look at you after you'd heard this."

Faith - Simon Napier-Bell has it; Chrysalis have it; Bruce Woolley has it; Connie Filippello, the publicity person, has it. But Rupert Everett mislaid it between 5.30pm and midnight. Insecurity - Rupert has it. Paranoia - Rupert had a heavy dose of it for six hours.

Why is this very successful actor and much-in-demand person behaving like this? Conversations like the one above took place in the photographer's studio, the pub and several times at his Chelsea home. I was fascinated and relentless, he was unyielding. Fear and loathing - Rupert has that too, particularly for the press, ever since he got "stitched up" by the only other journalist he's invited to his house. But he'll pull off this pop thing. He's attractive, clever and, in his own words, can "knock people sideways with charm." Who needs a voice when you possess all that?

Yet despite the fact that my continued requests to be treated to a brief burst of Rupert's recordings are met with continued refusals, I have it too. Faith, that is. I suspect that the cautious Everett is planning to hide his light under a bushel until he's made it onto the cover of Smash Hits. Consider this: would Simon Napier-Bell be involved in anything that doesn't smell of Cash with a capital C? I can see we both agree. But what about Rupert, surely he can't be as ingenuous as he likes to appear.

"God, that's really weird if that's your immediate reaction. If people think Simon Napier-Bell's interested in money, or rather, in other words, in commercial properties that do well; if, as you say, his interest is going to reflect so much on me, then it means that whatever I do, people will think that my music's just like Wham! and so they'll buy it. But people don't think that way, not the way you think, I'm sure. I don't think of it as a cash jog but maybe I could see it was a step backwards, that would piss me off, but I've been out of my depression long enough to try this."

Perhaps I should go back to the beginning. Rupert Everett, former star of Another Country and Dance with a Stranger, is about to two-time his profession and embark on a Top 40 career. To say that he's reluctant to talk about this new direction in an under-statement to say the least. Like getting blood out of a stone, you have to squeeze Rupert very hard indeed. An hour later he's contradicting himself.

"Chatting is my hobby. People say they hate doing films. English actors are always complaining about sitting around and waiting. I love it, I love drinking coffee and talking about all the other people. That's what's really good, watching all the people on the crew, especially if you're on location, staying in hotels and all the actors are fucking each other. You can watch the way they interact. You know that they're having an affair, but on the set they're really professional and distant... the crew are always much nicer than the actors. Actors tend to take themselves so seriously and it's so boring. But I suppose you have to take yourself seriously sometimes, don't you?"

Certainly he takes the photo session seriously. He's so nervous about having his photograph taken in my presence that I have to hide round the corner. i thought this was a trifle odd since he spends much of his time in front of whirring cameras. "If you have your photo taken over a number of years," he explains later, "you realise that they become scaringly accurate and judgmental. I feel very insecure about the way I look and about all the things I have to do to look good. I know the reason I'm successful in films is something in me that doesn't come across in the still camera."

Vanity kills. I express my surprise at this strange lack of confidence from such a pin-up actor, a sex symbol with a faithful gay following. He disputes this comment quite shirtily.

"For a start I won't admit that I'm gay because I don't believe that I am, so I don't care what people say. I don't' want to deal with that. And I don't think that I'm particularly sexy. I don't think other people do. I think you're wrong, people don't believe what they read in the papers."

Bur surely he must have noticed that during the last two years he's originated a new look - that particularly public school 'English' look which has gained considerable momentum from Michael Roberts' ultra-camp Tatler fashion spreads, featuring Everett-style pretty boys lounging in punts and Gaultier.

"Shut up! Fuck off! I hate all that. Listen to your tone - 'you're sooo English.' God, you're so damning! Anyway, I'm not, so there. You're just missing out."

I must add here that the last comment was broken up with a lot of laughter, although I'm not sure what I'm missing out on. One thing I do know is that Rupert doesn't try to propagate the myth put about by most good-looking people that good looks are a curse. "I don't think anyone feels good-looking. I certainly don't, so it's not a curse for me. I feel I have to try and be good-looking rather than try not to be... You really don't believe me, do you?"
This is the problem. Rupert Everett is either a very charming person or a brilliant actor-cum-conman. After chatting in the studio when the tortuous ordeal of having his picture taken was over, we adjourned to a pub in order to wait for a taxi to take us to his home just off the Kings Road. Just an hour with Rupert and we're laughing and ribbing each other like old friends. Do I really believe him?

Upon arriving at his house we spent fifteen minutes deciding where to sit to conduct our "interview", which gets increasingly bizarre as the evening draws on. I begin by asking why he was, at the age of 17, kicked out of the London School of Speech & Drama.

"I don't really know why I was kicked out. I wasn't into what they were creating. I know that sounds pretentious, but they were so into everybody doing everything perfectly, playing any situation or any part, it was like acting by numbers. I always thought acting was an extension of yourself. The most interesting thing about really good actors is that they extend themselves across the screen into the audience. that doesn't mean that they don't act, because they do. But it's very difficult to portray the things that are interesting about yourself, because they're very small things. Good examples of actors that can do it are Garbo, De Niro and Jessica Lange. Peter O'Toole as well at one time. They have a real spark of something that you couldn't see anywhere else. Films are only interesting if you really get individuality across, and the only way that happens is by the actor being truthful...

"What I was trying to do at acting school was to project the things that I thought were interesting. So my performances started off by being terribly mannered, incredibly overstated in a way that some people saw as cheap because it was obvious. But I saw it as acting that was based on little idiosyncrasies that were heightened. I see that as truthful acting, others see it as hammy. I went much further with it, I took it into my everyday life as well.
" Also, another problem was that I became very tall. My hair was cropped so short that I literally hand no hair and i was very thin and wore really tight trousers, so when I was playing a part of the 45 year-old burgher as part of my filofax of characters, I looked completely bizarre. I was very hung up about my height. I still am. When I was 15, I was 5'6", when I was 17, I was 6'1" - I found it very difficult to deal with. You get used to dealing with people on a certain level and when you get tall, people assume you have confidence. I found that a great strain. Also, in the theatre, it's not a good thing to be tall. It's the opposite in ballet. I mean, Wayne Sleep had to leave the Royal Ballet because he was too small."

Gosh, I never knew that, but I'd rather know what really happened.

"Oh, alright. It happened at the end of the term, which is quite a nervy time, and they said they were very worried about me and had to see me, so I knew I was fired, because I'd had a warning. They told me in front of everyone else that I had to leave. They said, 'the talent is not in question but we don't think you fit into the theatre as we see it.'
" After that, my main motivation was to prove them wrong. If you're thrown out of drama school it's the end, you're finished before you've even begun. The whole profession is so mad and weird. Six thousand people apply for twenty-eight places at drama school. When you leave school you know that there are five hundred Equity cards and ten thousand unemployed actors. Every step of the way the difficulties become bigger and bigger until, by the time you leave, you think that the tattiest rep theatre is a glamorous Hollywood studio. You're manipulated into a position of fear by the profession that if you're fired from drama school... well, just forget it. It was a very upsetting time for me."
The story goes that Rupert turned into that sort of vagabond, walking around barefoot, cruising down the Kings Road and not being very selective. He confirms the bare feet but not the cruising, naturally. He then went to Glasgow to work at the Citizens Theatre, where he was picked out by Philip Prowse. From there to the stage production of Another Country, at which point his career entered and entirely new phase. Admirers included Orson Welles, who chose Rupert to play the young Welles in an autobiographical film which Welles was set to direct. This is the point at which all information on Everett stops. Where did her disappear to? What was he doing?

"Well, Orson died. That was when I became really depressed. The film fell apart before he died but I had spent all the money I had thought I was going to earn from it. It was so much. Let's say I would have been in trouble if I couldn't pay it back. I got into huge debt, so badly that it became more of a problem than just not having enough money. I nearly had to sell everything and be declared bankrupt, which is very humiliating and it would have made me look so stupid. My depression took the form of great physical exhaustion. I became completely immobilised. I stayed in bed and slept a great deal. I still answered the phone because I was always hoping to get a job and I was up for some good jobs which I didn't get, so I wasn't able to make my depression passive. I became very negative and aggressive. I was terrified of becoming a failure. The last film I did was Dance with a Stranger which I finished in May '84 and I hated doing that film as well. I didn't enjoy it at all.

"I began to lack confidence a lot, more than I'd anticipated. I'd always anticipated a certain worry. I think it's creative to question yourself in everything you do, but I went way over the top, becoming pretentious, narrow-minded, idealistic, romantic. It's very easy to fall into so many traps and suddenly you wake up five years later and you've become the most boring person in the world. I was also depressed at not being in the position to be free if I didn't solve my money problems. I felt I was being forced to do stuff that I wouldn't do normally. That's one of the reasons why I hated doing Dance with a Stranger. I really hated the process of it. I'd always thought that I could pull out if I didn't like it, but of course I couldn't because I'd become financially dependent on it.

"But I didn't do any films after that because I knew they'd ruin my career, although they'd have solved my financial problems. Meanwhile, I was being threatened more and more by the fact that I was so indebted to my bank. I owed a great deal of money and my house was mortgaged. I was straitjacketed. I had to get a job but I didn't, at first because I didn't want to, and then, when I became desperate, of course I didn't get offered anything. An amazing thing happens in the film business. My scent went in the wind and nobody would touch me. Film producers can smell disaster. They're insensitive on almost every other level, but they can sniff a failure a mile off. That's when I became really insecure and lost my footing, not just in acting, but I couldn't deal with having the phone reconnected or a puncture. My depression and lack of confidence turned me into a cripple."

So now you know where Rupert Everett was for a year and a half. In bed. An unwanted sleeping beauty. But just when he was on the brink of giving up completely, his fairy godmother appeared, once again in the guise of Philip Prowse, who took Rupert back to Glasgow to act in another Citizens Theatre production, Heartbreak House. Although Everett had only a small part, he considers it to be one of the best performances he's ever given, "a very good and efficient little piece of acting." He regained his confidence and the ball started rolling very quickly again. He was offered fifteen films simultaneously and he's doing them all. He's just started his fifth but he skims over the previous four - three of which open this spring and summer - with great speed, pausing only to tell me a little about Hearts of Fire, in which he starts alongside Bob Dylan.

"It's about the music business. I play what American audiences think of as the archetypal comic strip version of an English rock star - it's a very dodgy and embarrassing area to be dealing with."

Of course this is exactly what Rupert is doing now - becoming involved in a real-life dodgy and potentially embarrassing area. Obviously I'm still fishing for clues about his newly chosen quest for pop stardom, but still he remains awkward and tight-lipped when it comes to the question, once again, of hearing his music. Some people might think Rupert Everett is neurotic, others may decide he's a tease. Personally, I think he's both and more, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Why can't I hear what you've done so far music-wise?

"Oh, I couldn't. I'm too nervous. You're just dying to hear it because you know it's going to be so bad, don't you? Don't you? That's what you think."

I don't know what to think. I can't imagine it at all.

"You can. You'll think it's awful."
Maybe you're going to be the new Pepsi and Shirlie?

"That would be great. I'd love that."

Come on Rupert, let me hear a bit.
" OOOOH, it's fab but bad. But don't you thinks it's clever? It's really interesting. I look at it just how you said all that, that's how I feel. Do you know what I mean?"

Not at all - go on, just a quick blast.
" I would be so embarrassed for you. Also, I'd be really upset if you said you didn't like it."

This is ridiculous. Everyone will hear it when it's released in a few weeks. How will you cope if it's a terrible flop?

"Well, it's a responsibility I've taken on. If you really want to do something and you don't do it, it's really depressing. It's when you start getting gallstones and cancer. They sink into your subconscious as this thick growing fibre of cancer. I've always wanted to be a singer but at the start, when I was trying to assess inside what type of performer I wanted to be, I saw singing as such a short career and I was afraid not to have a career."

Well no-one can accuse me of not doing my job. I think I know what Americans mean when they say: IS THIS GUY FOR REAL? Of course he's not, he's just got a great sense of humour. However, Rupert continues to volunteer more scraps of information. Maybe he thinks he's feeding a dog. What can anyone be thinking when they turn round and say to you, "I've got my glasses on and i can see exactly what you think of me. You look at me as if I'm a deranged giraffe, completely juvenile remedial Hooray." He ploughs on in the same breath. "To perform as a star is a very difficult act to continue." It's double-take time, for me at least. Is Rupert a card or a cad? Once again, I think he's the proud owner of both qualities.

I continue with the hounding hack routine. So, who approached who? How did the musical bit come about?

"No-one approached me. Finally it happened, uh, I don't know how far to take you back on this one, ha ha, um, put it this way, it successfully happened after I'd made attempts to get deals over the last two or three years and never really got anywhere. I also felt I had to prove myself as an actor and also, honestly, there wasn't enough interest. Otherwise someone would have pursued it much further.

"What was I just saying? I'm being so boring, I just remember going da-da-da-da-da. Oh yes, I approached a manager and a record company and I got my agent to take me to see Simon Napier-Bell. Ha ha, what's wrong with all these people? Why are you laughing? You think it's a really improbable thing for me to sing, don't you. Let me ask you a question: if you saw me on Top of the Pops wouldn't you be able to take a film that I did seriously?"

Maybe, probably.

"That's awful. It's so narrow-minded. I think people in inner city areas with delusions of sophistication think that. most people accept the weirdest things if they're done in a fundamentally truthful manner. They may not like them but they can accept it. I want to sing, it's a project I have to do, it's a serious endeavour, it's just as serous as acting."

I really wasn't scoffing at all but I did learn something else about Rupert - he has a temper. He literally screamed those last words at me. Why he's so defensive I have no idea, but I'll prolong this frivolous mood and tell you a few not well-known facts about Rupert. For instance, did you know that his ideal male-bed-mate would be James Dean? Or that he holidays with Bryan and Lucy and takes high tea with Bob and Paula? He loves Brookside and has a fetish about going to restaurants. He would describe himself to a blind person as "a tall, pale giraffe." He asks, "Are 'the proles' the people who read the News of the World and The Sun, or are they the people who read BLITZ and The Face?" Plus! His brain tells him not to trust anybody. Plus! The only time he argues with people is when they're not there.

Rupert is also very adept at turning the tables by answering a question with a question. I asked him if he expected fidelity from his lovers.

"Do you expect truthful answers to all your questions? Well, I don't think I've ever been in a position to expect fidelity from anyone. That can be taken two ways, and both of them are equally plausible - what did I just say? Ha! I am absolutely lost, er, ah yes. Either I haven't been a person with whom they can expect fidelity, or I've never been in a situation where I was allowed to demand it. All your questions are so questionable. What is your self? God, what kind of person are you, I wonder? Tell me. I feel I change all the time and I'm turning into a different person as I get older - um, I keep going blank, I don't know what I'm talking about!"

Another burning question is just how does Mr. Napier-Bell intend marketing Rupert? Again, I drew another blank, so we toyed with a few ideas. Manipulating the tabloid press is a popular ploy but the rule is that the headline must tell the whole story within five words. I suggested CASH CRAZY EVERETT GOES POP! but Rupert preferred CASH STARVED ACTOR TURNS POPSTAR! which he changed to CASH STARVED PSYCHO. Apart from Don Johnson, who doesn't count anyway, Rupert Everett is the first actor to do this. He could be the start of a new breed. Rupert smiles intelligently and nods: "Yeah, a tasteless new breed!"

At one point in the evening he asked me to tell him what I thought of him. I'll repeat my answer because my opinion hasn't changed: amusing, clever, a wind-up merchant, insecure, shy, neurotic, self-contradictory, but most of all absolutely lethal. Lethal but likeable.