Rupert Everett Unleashed

Gregorio Binuya, abacausa.com / Newscom Rupert Everett, currently garnering raves on Broadway for his role in the Noel Coward revival of Blithe Spirit, has a reputation for outrageous candor. Here, he lets it rip to Kevin Sessums about his exasperation with the British (“the audience is like a bunch of old sluts who have had too much sex”), his views on gay surrogate parenthood (“This whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian is just really weird”), and a very intimate take on Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (“I did rather politely tell him that morning that I thought he was a very good fuck”).

After appearing in 25 films—two of which earned him a Golden Globe nomination—publishing two novels, and penning a memoir, Rupert Everett is making his Broadway debut. In Blithe Spirit, which opened last month, he plays Charles Condomine, a widowed writer, since remarried, who is haunted at a séance by the ghost of his first wife. “Mr. Everett does shallow splendidly,” raved Ben Brantley in the New York Times, “and even finds a few teasing currents of depth in the dapperer-than-thou Charles.”

The Daily Beast’s Kevin Sessums met up with the outspoken actor on his way to the theatre last week for a bite of dinner—and some biting conversation.

"These awful middle-class queens—which is what the gay movement has become—are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers."

So how’s the run going? I was sitting in a Starbucks yesterday in the theatre district and three teenage boys from Kentucky were up here for spring break. They had just seen your matinee and were busily dissecting the performances. They were the kind of boys who came to New York to see theatre on spring break instead of ogling girls in Daytona Beach. They were swooning over you.

That’s sweet. But the audiences here compared to London audiences are very warm to start with. There’s an enthusiasm. When you’re European and you came here back in the 1970s, that’s what you came for—this amazing American enthusiasm. I’ve gotten in touch with that a bit again doing this play. In London, the audience is like a bunch of old sluts who have had too much sex and can never cum. They’re mean and they dare you to entertain them.

So you’re homesick.

In fact, I am at the moment. Very. But not for the English audience.

Have you been watching the G-20 Conference in London? Has that made you homesick? You come from a long line of politicians. Your great grandfather, Sir Donald Maclean, was head of the Liberal Party in England from 1918 to 1922.

I’m not really a political animal but I am rather fascinated by the meltdown of England and America. In the end, it seems as if America might come out of it, but I’m not sure if England is ever going to recover.

Do you think British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has a good chance of replacing Gordon Brown?

Oh, I think they’re all hopeless, the lot of them. It doesn’t really matter who’s the prime minister. In one sense, we’re all the prime minster. It just seems that we cannot change ourselves; we are incapable of changing. All anyone wants is to get back to the same hell we were in before.

What’s your opinion of the Obamas?

Well, they are certainly glamorous. They are gorgeous looking. And they are inspiring. But at the end of the day, the only thing they can do is to bring out the Obama in each of us—that thing that you can get there, if you want to. There just doesn’t seem to be a solution to the mess we’re in at the moment. One of the members of my cast is Christine Ebersole and she’s one of these conspiracy theorists. People like that have always seemed a bit mad to me, but the crazier things get, the less mad these people are beginning to seem. Christine said backstage the other night, “It’s all been written on the dollar bill since the beginning. There’s always just been one bank and they’ve always been snuffing out all the little banks.” There’s nothing one can do about it so we might as well perform a bit of Noel Coward.