Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett on Hollywood, Gen Z

and cancel culture

Rupert Everett is 100 per cent ready for death. “I wouldn’t mind it happening straight after this interview,” he says. He wouldn’t mind walking out of this restaurant with its black banquettes and white tablecloths into the steaming Soho afternoon and being knocked down by a London bus, he says. “Really. I’m serious. I love death. Everyone’s so worried about it, so afraid. But I always think that death sounds quite exciting. Especially when you think of everyone who has died.” Quick and painless is preferable. “Death by firing squad, for instance, looking them straight in the eye. Fabulous,” he leans back. “But without torture. I couldn’t do any torture beforehand.”

And then Everett does a back-pedal, which may be a disclaimer to soothe the easily offended, and says that, yes, he recognises that the whole process of death isn’t very nice. “You know, chemo, radio. We all have friends going through that stuff and it is terrifying,” (although his friend Nicky Haslam, the designer, “adored chemotherapy”), and Covid-19 deaths are horrid. “I really didn’t like the idea of my poor 94-year-old mum dying alone in the hospital with everyone in masks.” And I have the sense of having arrived at the funfair and then having to backtrack the entire journey there on tiptoes.

This routine is repeated through the afternoon: outré quip, whispered disclaimer, like the terms and conditions at the end of a radio ad, a reverse ferret of pre-emptive apology. Worse, he starts mouthing, “No, no, we can’t talk about that!” about subjects such as the raging trans rows, or gay marriage, or prostitution, his dark eyes dropping to the tape recorder as if it is a spy. He’s even cautious talking about his character in a new Channel 4 series, Adult Material, in which he plays a sloppy small-time porno “villain”, who won Best Bottom in 1983 (and whom he “partly” based on his director friend Sean Mathias).

And then he comes out with it. “It’s difficult to have a conversation about anything in today’s New Puritanism,” he says. He feels like “the wrong type of queen”. 

read the full article on The Times