Rupert Everett Unleashed

What draws you to Coward? Where do you rank him as a writer? Below Shakespeare and above you?

He’s a great writer while being a funny little one also. I say funny little one because of his obsession with class and the class he came from. For example, in Blithe Spirit the class he paints is this weird, wonky kind of circus-mirror class that doesn’t exist but is his version of a something of a something and none of it quite makes sense. But at the same time there is a Chekhovian side of Coward waiting to be mined. There’s something lyrical and rather touching at how his characters use manners to mask a sort of sadness, and yet he is quite savage about relationships. And I also find from the vantage point of 2009 a romantic side to a play like Blithe Spirit—romantic in the sense that when Madame Arcati talks about bicycling through the woods and the birdsong being deafening, it evokes such an idea of England itself. Angela Lansbury, who is playing Madame Arcati, is a great actress, and when she says that line it captures for me a time in England before that great crash of the Second World War with all those planes roaring overhead and all that followed which has culminated in—oh, I don’t know—in diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and ADHD and prescriptions for Ritalin. Yet Coward is a difficult playwright to act because there is also a lazy side to him and he has the actors say the same thing over and over again.

"This surrogacy thing is crap. This whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian is just really weird."

One of the things you’ve had to say over and over again is that you’re gay. And yet when those teenagers from Kentucky were talking about you, that’s one of the things they were so appreciative about. You are a kind of role model for them.

God, I hope not. I don’t think kids should have role models. They’re disastrous. My own role models were film stars who were tortured and downed barbiturates on film sets and I thought that was just the coolest thing. Montgomery Clift and people like that. I just think having role models is terrible.

When you came out of the closet did it upset your rather upper-class family back in Britain? I know your great uncle Donald Duart Maclean was part of the Cambridge Five and was a double agent for the Soviets. He was even made a brevet colonel in the KGB. Which was more upsetting to your parents, having a Soviet spy in the family or an avowed homosexual?

Oh, an avowed homosexual. They would have much preferred I be a double agent. But they are quite old now—my father is quite unwell—and age has a way of knocking down a lot of things that mattered before. They are very sweet, my parents. They are very sad in one sense, that they don’t have grandchildren.

But being gay doesn’t preclude one from having children. You could adopt or go the surrogacy route that so many gay men are using these days.

"Being an actor in Hollywood is not that great a job anymore. It’s become the sluttiest job on the planet."

I think this surrogacy thing is crap. It is utterly hideous. I think it’s egocentric and vain. And these endless IVF treatments people go through. I mean, if you are meant to have babies then great. But this whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian and then it gets cut out is just really weird. If I did have the impulse to be a parent, I would adopt—or foster. But this whole thing of forcing the idea of parenthood on us gay men is so bogus. Marriage? Babies? Please. I want to be illegal. I want to live outside the mainstream.

You’re so old-fashioned.

Or am I slightly ahead of the curve? It has to change. These awful middle-class queens—which is what the gay movement has become—are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still...