Rupert Everett tells Attitude about how his early career was a bit like being in a boy band, making a film about his idol, Oscar Wilde, and the debt Drag Race owes to the playwright

Words Paul Flynn

Rupert Everett

Photography Leon Csernohlavek

Rupert Everett’s history with Oscar Wilde stretches back to the actor’s childhood. “When I was five or six, my mum read me The Happy Prince”, he says, of the writer’s beautiful tale. He can remember certain intonations of certain lines as she recited Wilde’s prose, never far from a pithy truism, even in his primaryschool tongue. Now Rupert has called his sad, funny, poignant biopic of Wilde’s lost, dying years in exile after the story. It is an elegant reminder of more innocent times. “Not to sound too like Shirley MacLaine here”, he says with a chuckle, “but I feel very much in communion with Oscar Wilde.” When it debuted at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, The Happy Prince became Everett’s first significant critical hit for a some time. The actor is brutally unsentimental about his career, and can even be a touch over self-deprecating about his genuine achievements. He laughs about the actors he broke out with, in Another Country, first on the stage, as a teenager fresh out of drama school, then in the award-winning and breathtaking film adaptation.

In the 1930’s tale of suicide, sexuality and identity set in the cloisters, cricket pitches and lakes of a very English public school, Everett starred with Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth and Daniel Day-Lewis. “We were rather like a boy band”, he says of his old acting alumni, fleshing out that if the analogy were to stand, he would be Robbie Williams, Branagh would be Gary Barlow (“Oh, he’s so Gary”, he laughs, “at some royal performance or another”), and Firth the Mark Owen figure with a dash of Howard Donald.

And Day-Lewis? “He was above us all, like the American who escaped the biggest boy band and then conquered the world.” Justin Timberlake? “Indeed!” In The Happy Prince Everett is reunited with Firth on screen for the first time in 16 years. They last appeared together in another Oscar Wilde film project, Oliver Parker’s reimagining of The Importance of Being Earnest, and one of Everett’s favourite scenes in the new film involves The King’s Speech star towards the end of the film.