Rupert Everett at 67: 'I Can't Understand Who I Was'
SkimNews Take
The intensity of past self-destruction Everett describes suggests a performative element to his youthful persona, perhaps a way to both explore and externalize internal conflict through public transgressions.
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Rupert Everett, who has just turned 67, opened up about his past in a new interview, describing his younger self as 'brash. Pushy. Disingenuous. Lethal' and saying he 'simply cannot begin to understand the man he used to be.'
- Everett blamed his behavior on 'the weird remains of a punk upper-class attitude,' arguing that 'heroin is more the upper-class version of punk,' which he contrasted with the working-class punk movement of his youth.
- Everett said he 'behaved incredibly badly' in the original 1981 run of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country, dressing as a rabbi and sitting in the audience box during scenes he wasn't in, and once planting sugar lumps that hatched into flies during a tea party scene, causing an actor to scream mid-show.
- Everett's two memoirs — Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins (2006) and Vanished Years (2012) — included barbed portraits of A-list friends; he wrote that Julia Roberts and Madonna smelled 'vaguely of sweat' and that Madonna's stress brought out 'the old whiny barmaid,' after which Roberts didn't speak to him for a long time.
- Everett reflected on his typecasting in Hollywood after My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), saying he was hit with a 'triple whammy' of being gay, posh and 6ft 4in tall, which made leading-man roles hard to land.
- Everett said he is now 'almost crippled' from the bodybuilding he did during his 'Hollywood year,' explaining that he never bothered with stretching or the tendon care required for lifting weights.
Why it matters: The interview reframes Everett's well-documented bad-boy reputation as something he can no longer identify with at 67, and the specifics — sending an audience member a cutting of his own pubic hair by way of apology, confessing to ruining *Another Country* on stage, admitting to almost mistaking a tree for a man on Hampstead Heath — give the self-criticism an unusually concrete, almost memoir-grade weight rather than a celebrity-apology register.
Ask SkimNews
