He Shines Bright but Oh, So Reluctantly

NEW YORK — Rupert Everett is having a bad day.

He is seated on a couch in his rented Greenwich Village triplex having his picture taken. The photographer is trying to get him to smile. Everett just stares stonily into the camera. With his chiseled features and sensual lips, he looks like an angry Roman god by way of a motorcycle movie.

“It can’t be that bad,” says one of the crew, trying to lighten things up.

It’s that bad. They move him downstairs into the courtyard for another roll or two of film, but he still won’t smile. The irony is that he has plenty to smile about. The next night he will be attending the New York premiere of his latest movie, “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” starring Julia Roberts, Dermot Mulroney and Cameron Diaz (the film opened Friday and pulled in an estimated $21.5 million).

Roberts plays a food writer who decides she is in love with her best friend (Mulroney) and tries to sabotage his pending wedding. Everett practically walks off with the movie as her gay editor and confidant whom she enlists as her “fiance.”

Everett resists the idea that he steals the show, though the filmmakers would disagree (see article about changes made in the film to expand his role, F1).

“I think Julia is the best thing in the movie,” he says, stretching out on the couch in a sweatsuit and T-shirt. His arthritic 7-year-old Labrador retriever curls up next to him.

“It’s a hard part. And she’s redefined herself from when you first saw her in the movies. She’s a really clever comedienne, and I think it’s a fantastic vehicle for her. It’s easy to say someone steals a movie because they’re kind of new to people and they have a showy part. You can quite easily miss the center.”

The center, he says, has a lot to do with gender relations. “What I think is clever about the film and what I think is quite now about the film is that I think we are in a time when we’re completely reevaluating the male-female relationship. And the male-male relationship, all relationships.”

The Scottish-born Everett, who is 38 and openly gay, may be new to audiences, but he’s been around awhile. In addition to appearing in such films as “Another Country” (1984), “Dance With a Stranger” (1985), “Ready to Wear” (1994), and “The Madness of King George” (1994), he’s also worked onstage--perhaps most memorably in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” playing what was traditionally the part of a dying woman as a demented AIDS patient in drag.

He’s written several novels, including the semiautobiographical “Hello Darling, Are You Working?,” about a gay out-of-work English actor living in Paris who ingests a variety of drugs and has to hustle to make ends meet.

Everett is also a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. He’s done some professional singing and songwriting (once performing on film with Bob Dylan). He represents Yves Saint-Laurent’s Opium for Men fragrance. He speaks French and Italian. He’s a man of many talents--and moods.

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At present he’s not in the mood to be photographed or interviewed and he’s not interested in becoming a star.

“When I was 15, I wanted to be a star,” he says. “I would spend my whole time pretending I was being photographed by paparazzi and stuff or bowing at curtain calls. But the reality of both of those things I find very awkward. One of my least favorite things in acting when I’m in the theater is to take curtain calls. I find it really embarrassing.

“I find the attention incredibly nerve-racking as well,” he continues. “Nerve-racking when you get it, nerve-racking when you don’t. It’s a lose-lose situation either way. However, having said that, I like working. I’ve discovered comedy, which I really enjoy. And I have lots of ideas. So in that sense I’m work motivated. Stardom--I like being successful, but I like being successful on the level I am.”

This level is relatively new. As his resume suggests, Everett has had to do many different things over the years. The son of an army officer turned businessman, he was educated at Benedictine monastery but dropped out at 15. He was accepted to London’s Central School for Speech and Drama but was kicked out. Why?

“I suppose I was pretty much of a mess at that point,” he says. “I don’t remember, to be honest. I just think they didn’t think I was very good.”

He then toured with the Citizens Theater Company of Glasgow. When asked if that’s where he got his training, he replies, “I think you get training all through your career. I don’t think you get that much of it in drama school.”

Despite the early successes of “Another Country” and “Dance With a Stranger,” Everett continued to scrounge for work. In fact, he’s always scrounged for work. “I’ve never worked more than once every 16 months on a movie, apart from last year, because of my position on the food chain,” he says. “Which means the stuff that gets my way, most of it is ridiculous.”

It’s been repeatedly reported that because he was fed up with acting he quit at the age of 26. He was living in Paris at the time. He insists that this is not true, that he had what he calls a “normal” career in Europe.

“There was very much a Brat Pack thing going on,” he says. “There was really no place for me. I went to live in Europe because I thought with 1992 coming and the unification of Europe, I would be a frontiersman English actor. I thought the language was bound to become English in films, so I should go there. I did about nine films. Three are really good. One was called ‘The Chronicle of a Death Foretold,’ based on the [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez novel. I did a film called ‘The Man With the Golden Spectacles,’ which was a huge European hit. The thing is, none of these films were exported out of Europe. England doesn’t recognize Europe. America doesn’t even know about Europe. So in those terms, I disappeared.”

At one point Everett ran out of money, and that’s when he began writing. And though he’s contemptuous of the notion that people get work from being “seen”--actors who believe this are “bovine,” he says--his literary efforts did raise his profile and acting offers soon followed. One of them was “Ready to Wear,” in which he worked with Roberts. It’s no coincidence that Roberts, who had casting approval for “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” OKd him for the role of her new best friend.

According to Everett, there was no audition. In fact, he didn’t even meet the director, P.J. Hogan (“Muriel’s Wedding”), because Hogan was in L.A. and Everett was in London doing a play. When they met on the set, however, they did improvise some of his lines and come up with new scenes. Everett says there was never any nervous handling of his gay character.

“I didn’t really approach it like that,” he says. “I approached it just as a part. I didn’t think of it politically. It wasn’t meant to be a screaming queen. I suppose it would have depended on who played it. Maybe somebody who’s straight would have played him gayer and someone’s who’s gay would play him straighter. I don’t know.”

He may have to think about these issues should he ever get his pet project, a movie version of “Hello Darling,” off the ground. Perhaps his work on “My Best Friend’s Wedding” will give him the clout to get it made. This thought is almost enough to make him smile. Not a chance.