Rupert Everett is at the top of the shoulda been list of movie stars.
Strikingly handsome and immensely talented, the My Best Friend’s Wedding star should have been the gay Jude Law of the 1990s, a fixture of tentpole movies and smart indies for clever people. Instead, Everett acknowledged in a recent interview at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, “I wasn’t the right type of gay, the wrong type of gay at the wrong time, as usual, typical me.”
Promoting his new memoir, To The End Of The World, about his 10-year journey to make a film about Oscar Wilde’s final years, Everett also pointed out what the world has lost because of social media.
“We’re in such a weird new world, a kind of Stasi it feels like to me, and if you don’t reflect exactly the right attitude, you risk everything just being destroyed for you by this judgmental, sanctimonious, intransigent, intractable, invisible cauldron of hags around in the virtual world,” he told interviewer Emma Freud.
Social media is just the latest way in which individualism is punished, of course. Everett was famously rejected for the Michael Douglas role in Basic Instinct because the studio thought that American audiences would see him as a “pervert.” One generation’s “pervert” becomes another’s “unwoke.”
