Rupert Everett on Why He Started Writing, Being Dazzled by Julie Andrews, and What He Thinks of the Kardashians

Armed with a rapier wit, Rupert Everett is one of those rare actors who holds writing as an equivalent competency, counting Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene among his primary literary inspirations. If you’ve read any of his previous books (a novel, Hello Darling, Are You Working?, and three memoirs—Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, Vanished Years, and To the End of the World: Travels With Oscar Wilde), you know the man is a resilient survivor with the intelligence necessary to pull the humor out of any situation.

Having surfed the ebbs and flows of showbiz for nearly five decades, Everett embraces how, for both actors and writers, rejection is part of the job. “You have to develop a strong hide,” he tells Vanity Fair during a call from his London home. With ingenuity, he’s turned his own rejections into inspiration with his most recent book of short stories, The American No, breathing new life into a handful of rejected star-vehicle pitches that lived on in his head.

Fresh from seeing his Emily in Paris costar Lily Collins in her West End play Barcelona (“Her prowess onstage was great!”), Everett is warm, congenial, and extremely gracious when technical difficulties foil our first attempt to connect. Finally, we delved into his creative exploits.

You’ve written four other books; your first, Hello, Darling! Are You Working? was described by Kirkus as “Candide in modern drag.” If you could go back in time to the writing of it, what advice would you give yourself?

If there was any advice to give, although I loathe advice—giving and getting—I think it’s to read more. The more you read, the better the writer you are. It’s the same thing for an actor. The more movies you see, the better an actor you are.

Your explorations of the life of Oscar Wilde have crossed stage (The Judas Kiss), screen (The Happy Prince), and now the written page. How does he continue to serve as inspiration?

I adore him still, but I’m not in the same relationship as I was before. For me, he’s a kind of Christ figure. I was raised very Catholic and I love the notion of Christ, but I don’t think Christ was the only Christ, and I think Oscar is another one. I think the road to gay liberation started with Oscar Wilde. Being a total genius and an idiotic fairy at the same time, he was crucified by society in a way that we could be reborn. With Oscar Wilde’s waddling around Paris in 1900, you could point to him and say, ‘That is a homosexual man.’ The movement had a face, it was on the move, and I think he knew that, somehow.

Now for the stories in your book: “The Wrong Box” was hilarious. What do you think the late film director John Schlesinger would’ve thought about his bit in it if he read it now?

‘The American No’ by Rupert Everett

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Simon & Schuster

I don’t know. Schlesinger thought my life was incredibly exotic. We parted on bad terms, which is something I regret enormously. The movie [The Next Best Thing, costarring his then friend Madonna] kind of tore us apart. We’d known each other since I was 15. I’d been working in a clothes shop in the holidays, and he heard that I was a funny character and he came to have some shoes fitted. I had only the size smaller than his feet and he said, ‘Why haven’t you got a bigger size?’ and I said, ‘Why haven’t you got smaller feet?’ That was the beginning of our relationship. He was an amazing, inspirational character. The Day of the Locust is still one of my all-time top 10 films. Our film was a reach too far for both of us, in the end, in the capacity that we took on. It fractured our relationship quite a lot. He died a couple of years later.

“Cuddles and Associates,” a wild story about an aspiring British actor who rises to prominence from the mail room at a talent agency, only to form an agency of his own that brokers NDA-protected primitive fertility procedures between obscenely rich women and handsome actors losing their luster. Dare I ask what or who inspired it?

I thought the [Hollywood talent] agency idea would be interesting if it was enlarged to include spoons, eggs, and wombs. It would be a wonderful thing for stars on the skids to market their own sperm. It seems like a wonderful no-brainer.

In the final story, you describe writing as something that gives you a “much-needed sense of purpose during the long winter afternoons of the soul when the phone doesn’t ring.” Surely, for someone as adept at the craft as you, the practice goes a little bit deeper than a receptacle for creative constipation.

I started writing in a moment of career doldrums so that’s how I got to do it, because I only really learned how to write when I was about 15. It’s just so lovely and lucky to have two arrows to one’s bow. Writing doesn’t come very easily to me. It’s lonely and anxious because you look at the page, read a paragraph of drivel, and you’re on your own with no one to help you make it better. Rehearsing a play with a group of actors is magical because all you have when you go into rehearsal is your own life as collateral. It feels sacred in the world we’re in now, which is so virtual with everybody working from home, and everybody hiding behind social media, nobody speaking, nobody talking.

What have you learned about yourself through the process of writing this book?

Nothing, really. [Laughs.] What I’ve learned about myself big time in the last few years is that I’m much more tenacious than I thought I was. That came from making my own film [The Happy Prince] because it kept falling apart and I kept having to rebuild it. I kept my energy up, and I finally managed to put it off.

How do you cope with vulnerable moments, when you feel a little self-doubt or anxiety creep in, if they do?

They do. When you’re younger, you’re like a young puppy—you forget and heal very quickly. Your bicycle has brake pads, brake fluid, and all the good things on it. When you’re older, in a way, you’re careening downhill on that bicycle and with worn down brake pads. That’s when bitterness sets in, the psychological cancer of old age. I’ve definitely had that. You have to die to the past all the time, I think that’s the knack. Just not holding onto who you were last week is the easiest way through it.

When you were young, what film made you think, I have to do that?

Mary Poppins. When Julie Andrews goes, I’m going too, I’ll tell you that much! I was just gobsmacked. Back then in England, there were these gigantic provincial cinemas with coral-colored satin curtains, 1,000 seats, an upper circle, and stalls smelling of cigarettes and sex and toilets. Everything about it was kind of epic. It seemed to be coming out from the screen rather than being projected onto it. Walt Disney, for me, is one of the great creators. Julie Andrews’s beauty was such an extraordinary type of beauty. I hadn’t discovered sexy women and sexy men at that point. I loved her in that and The Sound of Music.

If you could play any role at all right now, what would it be?

I have to take a Valium every time I see the posters for Conclave, which is the adaptation of the Robert Harris book about the voting of the new pope. I would’ve killed to be in that film.

What guilty pleasure do you have that no one would expect of you?

None—all my guilty pleasures I gave up years ago.

Not even like a Real Housewives franchise or anything like that?

I wouldn’t feel guilty about that! I love The Kardashians, for example. I’m interested in the rooms and the looks and the hair and the places. I can’t believe Kris Jenner! What a powerful, clever woman. And the couple, the ones that keep kissing, Kourtney and her husband [Travis Barker]. I like going to prison with Kim and all that. I can’t believe with all that money they’re always eating salads out of Tupperware. I’d love to be their buyer. Their amazing gyms and their custom-made Rolls-Royces, with pink piping on the seats!

Oh, to be a fly on the wall and observe from the sidelines…

No, I don’t want to go to anything. I just want to watch it on telly.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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