Rupert Everett
hates Hollywood. The British actor, whose screen hits
include Another Country, Shrek, and My Best
Friend's Wedding, says he's sick of the movie
industry's hypocrisy and homophobia. He's even tired
of celebrity—the whole glittering illusion
deliciously evoked and eviscerated in his candid new
autobiography, Red Carpets and Other Banana
Skins.
"Hollywood is a
mirage," said Everett, 47, reclining in jeans and
plaid shirt on the sofa of a London hotel suite. Movie stars
are "blobs who don't say anything, aren't allowed to
say anything. They are paid to shut up." Fortunately,
Everett can't help talking.
The book, for
which he reportedly received a seven-figure advance, is a
string of glittering anecdotes with edge, bonbons with a
bitter center.
Everett is a
waspish observer of the celebrity A-list, from Madonna
("she oozed sex appeal") to Julia Roberts ("beautiful and
tinged with madness") to Sharon Stone ("utterly unhinged").
The book is a
sort of Rough Guide to late 20th-century highlife—and
lowlife—that moves from London to Paris, New York,
St. Tropez, L.A.'s Laurel Canyon, and Miami's South
Beach. There are walk-on parts for Andy Warhol,
Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Welles, Bob Dylan, Donatella
Versace, and a host of other luminaries. Everett seems
to know everyone, remember all, and recount
everything.
Almost
everything. Everett skates quickly over his brief stint as a
London rent boy, although he cheerfully admits that he
stalked actor Ian McKellen.
The openly gay
actor also discloses his handful of heterosexual
affairs—with Paula Yates, wife of Bob Geldof, French
actress Beatrice Dalle, and Hollywood star Susan
Sarandon.
The book is a
feast for gossip fans, and Everett is an articulate and
charming raconteur with a knack for a memorable image. At
one point, a swimming pool is described as "shaped
like a Xanax."
"I think what
people will be really surprised about is the writing,"
said Antonia Hodgson, Everett's editor at British publisher
Little, Brown. "It's not just another celebrity book. He's
not so much interested in spilling the beans about a
particular celebrity, but about showing what celebrity
does to those people."
Everett says he
was inspired by The Moon's A Balloon, David
Niven's literate, witty memoir of Hollywood's golden age.
"I also loved the
prewar frenzy of Evelyn Waugh, that feeling of the end
of the world coming," said Everett. "It seems to me that,
especially through show business, everything is getting more
and more feverish and faster and nastier and scarier.
"Entertainment is
becoming the great decoy—we are so entertained,
it's almost impossible for us to think about anything else.
The only thing that has continuity in the news is
Jennifer Lopez's bottom."
The book is also
the story of Everett's lifelong flight from the
conformity of an upper-class English upbringing that saw him
sent away to a Catholic boarding school at the age of
7.
He recounts his
early career as a youthful rebel and party animal, friend
of prostitutes, addicts, divas, and thieves. He says he has
always been drawn to "the freaks, the overdoses, and
the suicides."
He says being gay
"certainly wasn't acceptable in any of the arenas that
were on offer to me. So I think I had an instinct to escape
into a world that I thought would be more friendly."
Everett was
disappointed to find showbiz "as middle-class and
provincial" as the private school world he'd left behind.
"My imagination
of show business was this red plush netherworld of
drunks and sex maniacs and killers and freaks," he said.
"It's not. My world is, because I've doggedly tried to
create that world. But it's not in general."
Everett has often
complained of Hollywood's homophobia, arguing that his
sexuality has stopped him from getting the leading-man roles
offered to his countryman Hugh Grant.
But he's also
highly self-critical. Everett emerges from the book as
ruthless and driven, a bit of a monster who confesses that
he "lied about everything. My age. My name. My
background."
"I think the
actor's geography, there's a hole in it somewhere," he
said. "There's a hole in your identity, a black hole that
you try and fill up with posturing."
For all his drive
to be a star, Everett is ambivalent about success. The
book recounts his highs—his breakthrough as an
English schoolboy turned Soviet spy in Another
Country, his Hollywood triumph as Julia Roberts's
gay pal My Best Friend's Wedding—and the many
lows. These include the disastrous rock-and-roll saga
Hearts of Fire and The Next Best
Thing, a limp comedy-drama costarring Madonna.
At the height of
his fame, after My Best Friend's Wedding, he is
recognized on the street as "the gay guy from that
movie."
He yearns to be
taken seriously as an actor, laments the superficiality
of Hollywood, yet has reportedly resorted to Botox
injections to maintain his lean, unlined good looks.
It's working. The sculpted cheekbones are intact, the
big, dark eyes as luminous as ever.
These days, he
travels the world on behalf of the Global Fund Against
AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and declares showbiz "not
very relevant."
"To be honest,
for me it's not the time for show business," he
said—although he's got a play, a movie, and "a couple
of TV things" in the works.
"Life behind a
velvet rope—I never enjoyed it. I like going out,
going to bars, going to clubs, hanging out on the street. I
always thought an actor should be like a bodybuilder.
His life should be like a muscle—it should be
exercised and flexed and worked. Doing everything,
experiencing as much as you can.
"It was a
conscious decision for me to exist like the people I really
admired on-screen—the Marlon Brandos, the Montgomery
Clifts, the James Deans.
"You felt they
had experienced everything. Their eyes were shocked
and dead and alive and glowing like coals at the same time.
And I think that was through experience, using your
life as a tool. That's the way I wanted to conduct
myself." (AP)
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