Rupert Everett

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:43

My castaway this week is Rupert Everett. As an actor, writer, and now director, he has learned and revealed more than most about how the show business game works. His razor-sharp memoirs chronicled the hits like Another Country in which he lit up the stage with his youthful good looks and charisma, his Hollywood breakthrough, My Best Friend's Wedding, and his passion project, The Happy Prince, about the final years of the exiled Oscar Wilde. He made even better copy out of the misses, including The Next Best Thing with Madonna. In fact, he argues that in his 40-year career, the snakes have been as useful as the ladders. He says we now live in a world where the only thing to have is success, but failure is marvellous. It's like living fertilizer because you're forced on yourself. Rupert Everett, welcome to Desert Island Disc. Thank you very much for having me. It's so thrilling to hear the music and to be actually on the show.

Rupert Everett1:30

Thank you.

Presenter1:35

Well, welcome. People don't usually like to talk about their failures, but you are rather good at it. How do you look back on those lean periods? The lean periods for most people in my business are the ones where you are forced to work harder. I think life is a struggle, and it's rather like being a kind of blade of grass growing between concrete slabs. And sometimes when you get lucky and you throw double sixes, it's difficult to not get lazy. And when you do go back to the bottom of the snake, you really have to try harder. I asked you about failure first. I do want to ask you about success, because it came relatively early for you. I mean, another country, first on stage and then on screen. You were just 22. How did you handle it? Yeah, I think success has come to me too early and too late, in a way. And I think I would have preferred it to have come in a more regular way in the middle. But anyway, it comes when it comes. It's a mirage as well, because once you've had one success, you need to make a bigger one. Particularly in our business, where you really are on a ladder, a kind of evolutionary ladder, and you know very much your position always on it. And you're always wanting to kind of elbow your way further up. And I wonder when it's ever going to end. You know, I always had this fantasy or joke of being, you know, 90 living in Brighton and being run over, catching the bus to go to an audition at the National Theatre. But it probably is what's going to happen because it's very difficult to let go.

Rupert Everett2:08

Is it

Rupert Everett2:23

In the middle

Rupert Everett2:51

The National Theatre.

Presenter2:56

And how did you find directing yourself? You loved working with me. I loved working with me. I really enjoyed directing myself because I knew what I wanted to do. And the whole notion of rehearsing, for example, a play nowadays is almost like post offices. It's so old-fashioned because you go into a rehearsal room and all you have is yourself and each other. And it's a communication that in our virtual world has more or less disappeared. So at the lunch break, everybody really reveals themselves to each other: marriages, relationships, addictions, all these things. And it's an incredible...

Rupert Everett2:58

I loved working with me.

Presenter3:31

Ambience, I thought, these last few times I've rehearsed a play. Before we hear your first disc, Rupert, I have to say that you've already been to our desert island in disc form yourself. I have. One of my previous castaways, Cressida Dick, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, chose your version of Love is in the Air, performed by you and Colin Firth and took it to the island. I mean, what an accolade. I know. The day it happened, I was absolutely electric with thrilldom, and as indeed was Colin Firth, actually. We were both so pleased. With that in mind, then let's get into your music. Tell me about your first disc today. My first song is really my favourite song from my youth, my disco youth. And it's also the song which is kind of one of the theme tunes of the film I'm now going to make, which is about disco in the 1970s in Paris. And it's called Native New Yorker by Odyssey. In my film, which is about me actually, I see Rudolf Nureev dancing on the dance floor at the club set in Paris to this song. And I edge my way through the crowd and kind of look daggers at him, hoping he's going to notice me. And finally, he sees me and he launches into this dance with me, pulling me back and shoving me forward and waltzing around. And then I get a sniff of poppers, and the whole world kind of explodes. And this is hopefully going to be a really good scene in my film.

Speaker 24:56

You're city girl

Speaker 24:59

Rule and the subway

Speaker 25:03

Running with people.

Speaker 25:06

I've been hollow down on Broadway, you're no trap, but you're no lay

Speaker 25:12

Talking that city talk

Speaker 25:14

You're the heart and soul of New York City.

Presenter5:17

Odyssey and Native New Yorker. So, Rupert Everett, you came out in the mid-1980s. You later said that your honesty was detrimental to your career. Why was that?

Presenter5:28

It wasn't easy in that period being gay in show business. It wasn't and it probably still isn't in a way. Things are changing all the time and really changing a lot now. But certainly in the 80s and 90s and it was definitely a challenge being gay. What was your motivation for wanting to be open about your sexuality, even in those difficult circumstances? I didn't really have a motivation. I just loved going out. Really being part of the gay scene, I suppose, more in a way than trying to carve out a place for myself in show business. I loved that whole culture. I couldn't live in that world and pretend I was something else. It just wouldn't have worked apart from anything else. And living a lie or trying to be dishonest. I'm not against it if that's the way you want to live your life, but it's quite difficult. And for me, that just wasn't the trip I wanted to go on, really.

Rupert Everett5:48

I didn't really.

Presenter6:18

And what about your attitude to Hollywood? I mean, you are unflinchingly cutting about some of the aspects of the industry in your memoirs, but of course you also evoke the very powerful allure that the place had for you. I mean, I love reading about you searching for the ghosts of its golden age, you know, when you first got there. I think when I was young, I was very unhappy in Hollywood. It is a very tough town, and it can be quite an isolating place. But this year, I was there again, I suddenly realised some very important things in my life had happened in LA, really incredible things.

Rupert Everett6:32

No one you found.

Presenter6:50

What happened there? Just, you know, relationships and friendships and arguments and funny things and weird jobs. And I did a film with an orangutan once in at one point when I was kind of not exactly on the skits but not going very far and

Speaker 27:04

Was this Dunstan checks in?

Presenter7:05

Dunstan checks in, which I think is a masterpiece. It was a great experience, and working with the orangutan, I must say, was one of the great scene partners of my career. Really? Yeah, that orangutan could do anything. I had a little front-piece wig during that film, and the orangutan used to watch as the makeup lady and the hairdresser would come up and pat down the wig. You had to control the orangutan before the scene starts. You'd go, stand up, sit down, stand up, and sit down, sit down, stand up, and you'd take over from the trainer. And one scene, I did my stand up, sit down, stand up. Don't get goofy, was the thing you had to say to him. And then he looked at me, and the first assistant said, Action, and he just leaned over and grabbed my wig and ate it. And so filming was stopped for like three days because, you know, wig doesn't come just like that. And he was such a good character.

Speaker 27:05

Simmons I

Rupert Everett7:22

Yeah.

Presenter7:54

Also, an adorable film. Orangutan Lives in a Hotel. Who wouldn't want to watch that? No, it was adorable. Rupert, it's time to go to the music. We're going to hear your second disc today. Why have you chosen this one?

Rupert Everett7:56

Who wouldn't want

Presenter8:03

Billy Holliday is a a a very important character to me, and I think the film Lady Sinks the Blues with Diana Ross was one of the things when I was a teenager.

Presenter8:14

that really kind of turned my head completely. And also an amazing angle in on the 70s when black power was so huge then. You know the gays and the blacks in 70s culture were on such a winning streak. You've changed. This song is one of the last recordings she made and it's really when she's a wreck. She can hardly sing anymore and you can feel the pain of her.

Rupert Everett8:42

Uh

Speaker 28:42

Your smile is just a careless yawn

Speaker 28:50

You're breaking my heart.

Speaker 28:53

You've changed.

Speaker 29:01

You've changed.

Speaker 29:05

Your kisses now are so blushing

Speaker 29:13

You bored with me in every way.

Presenter9:18

Billy Holiday and you've changed. Rupert Everett, your father, was in the military. He later worked in finance and apparently was a very keen traveller. You've said that every time you're in an airport you think of him.

Presenter9:29

I do. He had a heart attack on his travels, climbing an escalator in Hong Kong airport. And after that, he kind of lost his foothold, I think, a little bit on his travels. So when he got a bit older, he used to ask me to go to places with him. And this was the backdrop for us really getting to be friends for the first time in a way, because all the men in my family are from the military and the Navy, so they were very, very tough. So this bonus of being able to find each other in some shape or form at the end of his life, I think, was a great thing for me. I think if one of your parents dies and you haven't resolved something, it's very difficult to

Presenter10:07

How much did your perspective change on who he was?

Speaker 310:07

Uh

Rupert Everett10:07

To be able to do it.

Presenter10:11

It didn't really exactly change. I mean, he came up with quite surprising things. We went to Brazil once and we went to Manaus and he said to me, I've got a rather good lead to a restaurant. And we drove for miles down to the docks. And I thought, this is very peculiar. And we got to this restaurant and there was a table of four gorgeous black girls with blonde hair in mini skirts. And it was a kind of extraordinary escort bar. And my dad immediately got talking to them. And they misunderstood everything that he was saying. And when we got up to leave, they got into a taxi and followed us. And when we got back to our hotel in town, they screeched to a halt in a taxi behind us and thought they were coming for, you know, kind of orgy with me and my dad. And he said, I think you better deal with this.

Presenter10:56

I had to kind of pay them off and say, I'm so sorry, ladies. I think there's been a bit of a misunderstanding. And.

Presenter11:03

But so he was quite foxy in that way. You said that you were very close to your mother, you adored your mother. Tell me about her. I adored my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother, and I wanted to be a girl. I didn't like men, I didn't trust them. All the men in my family went sailing every weekend, and they played golf, two things that I found unutterably grim. And I loved necklaces and bras and all those kind of things, nestling up to my mum and my grandmum and my aunt. And at a certain point, my mum discarded an old tweed skirt. It was called a Pi R squared in those days, and I requisitioned it. I decided I was Julia Andrews' daughter when I was very young. And that's when I really disappeared into fantasy. I didn't ever learn when I was a child how to engage with other males until I was 15 and I left my public school. And then I didn't want to anymore be a girl. I really enjoyed being a homosexual.

Rupert Everett11:55

King.

Presenter12:01

One pivotal moment for you was your first visit to the cinema, the Embassy Cinema in Braintree. You were six, I think. Yeah, um it was to see Mary Poppins and that really was I think the the moment that completely turned my life upside down. I'd never been to a film before that so in the old provincial flea pit, these gigantic smoky cinemas, theatres with dress circles and upper circles and an organ and this amazing pink satin curtain lit from underneath and then seeing Mary Poppins and Julia Andrews was mind-blowing for me. I think that brings us to your next disc.

Presenter12:39

Thank God we're not on camera because I might burst into tears. This is Julie singing Feed the Birds.

Speaker 212:47

To the birds toppin' a bag Toppins, toppin', toppin' Sab

Speaker 213:00

Yeah.

Presenter13:00

The birds, that's what she cries While overhead her birds fill the skies

Rupert Everett13:09

Uh

Presenter13:13

Feed the Birds by Julie Andrews from the soundtrack to Mary Poppins.

Presenter13:18

You were just seven when you were sent away to boarding school, first to Farley House in Hampshire and later to Ampleforth College, which is a Catholic school in Yorkshire.

Rupert Everett13:23

And later.

Presenter13:27

That's young to be sent away from home. How did you cope with it? It's a kind of heartbreaking experience that you never quite recover from. I think these schools were made for empire because they calcified the hearts of the empire rulers. They would never be as hurt again as they were hurt by the abandonment of their parents. It changed you. You know, you used the word calcified, calcified your hearts. It cauterises something. I think it cauterises some emotional thing. Do you see that manifesting in your relationships, your life? Just being generally kind of a frosty person. If I'm a frosty person, which I probably am in a way, it comes from that.

Rupert Everett13:51

I think it cautiously.

Rupert Everett13:59

Yeah.

Presenter14:06

You were a Catholic boarding school, as I say, Ample Force. Did you have faith then?

Rupert Everett14:08

Um

Presenter14:11

Yes, and I was always praying that I wouldn't have a vocation because the priests always said to you, some of you will have a vocation and be called by God. And I was just terrified that I because I'd already harbouring a career as a flusie in show business and I didn't want it to be complicated by suddenly getting a vocation to become a monk or a priest. Tell me a little bit more about the appeal of pretending to be someone else. Well, first of all, getting away from the rest of the school into the environment of the theatre. Our theatre was apart from the rest of the school and everyone was a kind of misfit who was involved in it. And the weird thing was, my first play, I played Titania in

Presenter14:50

A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Queen of the Fairies, and in rehearsals I was incredibly bad because I was completely wooden. And the weirdest thing happened when I got on stage for the first show. I completely took over and this cackly laugh came out of me and I started acting up in ways that I'd never done during rehearsals ever and I brought the house down. And the reviewer in the Amberforth Journal said Rupert Everett's performance of Titania led one to believe that what Titania really needed was a good spanking. So I don't know how my performance was, but it just took off. And after that takeoff, I never looked back.

Presenter15:27

Let's go with the music. What's next? The Specials, Ghost Town. This is one of my favourite songs and this really reminds me, it's a core song from when I came to London and London was such a different town. It was falling to pieces, everybody lived everywhere. It wasn't just a wedding cake in the centre. But in fact, looking back on it, it was an extraordinary place full of bedsits. And this song is one of the great songs of the era.

Speaker 215:56

Uh

Presenter15:56

This car

Presenter15:59

It's called me ain't

Speaker 316:00

Uh

Speaker 316:03

All the clubs are being closed down

Speaker 316:09

This place

Speaker 216:10

Uh

Speaker 316:11

Uh

Speaker 216:12

This got me like a ghost

Speaker 316:13

Uh

Speaker 316:20

Fighting on the dance floor.

Presenter16:24

The Specials and Ghost Towns. So Rupert Everett, by 1975 you'd persuaded your parents to let you leave school and move to London to study drama. So you were just 16 when you were discovering the nightlife of the city. I stayed with a family, a very nice family, with two amazing dogs off the Fulham Road and on one of the walks with the dogs.

Rupert Everett16:32

And it's done.

Rupert Everett16:33

So you

Rupert Everett16:38

I s

Presenter16:46

I followed this man in black leather and I thought, God, who is this alien? And I was very excited. And we followed and followed and followed. And he went into this pub, which was called the Coalhern. And inside the pub, I looked through the windows, and there was all these other people in black leather and dressed as cowboys and Indians, and they were all touching each other up. And I thought, my God, so I tied the dogs to a lamppost and went in. And really, that was the beginning of my gay career, because it was the most extraordinary pub, this pub. I didn't realise this at the time. There's so little that you realize when you're young, but it had only been legal to be gay for something like six years, seven years. And the law was still a little bit ambiguous. And the law was still ambiguous in that public displays of homosexuality were still illegal. And bars and clubs were constantly raided. I remember being in the raid of a club in the King's Road. Everyone was herded into paddy wagons and nothing happened. You just got taken down there for half an hour of humiliation and then let out again. But it was a very extraordinary time because you counted just for being there.

Rupert Everett17:24

Shoo!

Speaker 217:26

And the law

Presenter17:50

But what was the allure? You know, you you kind of alluded to the fact that this this idea of counterculture was important. What were you getting out of that? Sex. Sex. And crashing my whole background out of my life. I came from such a

Rupert Everett17:58

Slow.

Presenter18:04

Regimented, militaristic background. Every shag I felt at the time was knocking that down and destroying it. I felt I'd lost myself from my own previous life. That's what I really felt. You were living this life while also studying at drama school, and after a while there, you were asked to leave because of insubordination. What did you do?

Rupert Everett18:21

Len

Rupert Everett18:25

What

Presenter18:27

Well, I don't know. Looking back on things, I feel that I was a terrible show-off. I was probably distracting to everybody. That was really my all-time low, because once you're chucked out of drama school, it doesn't feel like there's anywhere you can go. And that's where probably I benefited from a kind of rationing blitz background because I managed to get into my first theatre after that, which was the Citizens in Glasgow, which was the one I'd always wanted to go to. Yes, it sounds like you adored the Citizens' Theatre. I adored the Citizens' Theatre. It was the place that I dreamt of going to. When we were at drama school, they said, Oh, you don't want to go there because they will have sex in the showers afterwards. And I think, ooh, that sounds nice. But in fact, they didn't have sex in the showers. But apart from that, it really lived up to everything I wanted theatre to be. And the theatres and the gauge, the gaubles were still standing. What was so great about it is that they didn't condescend to their audience at all. They put on what they loved, and the audience reacted to it. The audience was largely working-class Glasgow, and they were amazing audiences. The only thing that they didn't like was if the play lasted beyond the 10.20 bus, which when we did my first play, which was an adaptation of the complete works of Proust, it was still going on at half past 11. And at 10.18, you just said, everyone left. But we didn't care. The breakthrough for you came after that. It was Guy Bennett in Julian Mitchell's play Another Country. And you played the same role in the 1984 film alongside Colin Firth. So you were a star. I mean, how quickly did life change? Well, I was in Glasgow one day. I went for the audition from Glasgow.

Rupert Everett18:54

That was the citizens.

Rupert Everett19:39

Uh

Rupert Everett20:03

Well

Presenter20:07

I got the part and it's and and the rehearsal started. It was in the Greenwich Theatre in Greenwich first of all. When the play opened, we just got amazing reviews. It was like a kind of boy band, theatrical boy band experience. It's time for your next disc rupert. What have we got?

Presenter20:21

My next disc is The Pet Shop Boys and The Pet Shop Boys really are my household gods completely. When my film, The Happy Prince, that I made, went to Berlin, Neil and Chris came to it at nine o'clock in the morning and their accolades were really more important to me than anyone else's, of all the songs, all of which I adore, but this is my very favourite one.

Speaker 220:41

Cause we want that

Speaker 320:43

Be Oh rain

Speaker 220:46

Uh

Speaker 320:46

We had too much time to find for us.

Speaker 220:50

And we will never be in boring

Speaker 220:54

We dressed up and thought some thoughts make amends.

Speaker 220:58

Be wonderful whole land

Presenter21:01

Worry that time would come to an end.

Presenter21:06

Uh

Speaker 221:06

We were always hoping that

Speaker 221:09

Looking back you could always rely on

Presenter21:15

Being boring by the Pet Jock Boys. Rupert Everett, by the time Dance with a Stranger was released in 1985, you'd acquired a bit of a reputation for being difficult. What do you remember about that time?

Presenter21:26

I remember not getting on with the director of Dance with a Stranger at all, and I think that's partly with what was happening, and partly because this was right in the middle of AIDS happening. And I think I was probably felt under a lot of strain. I was very lucky not ever to contract the HIV virus, but for all of us, and I'm not saying that, of course, the drama for me was anything like the drama for someone who did contract it, but for everyone involved, it was a terrifying time. Were you losing friends?

Speaker 221:30

Boom.

Speaker 221:57

We listen to

Presenter21:58

I was losing friends and uh w when you were losing friends I think I did go a bit crazy wi with with all of that as well. So I became militant in my own world, I suppose. In what way? I was on a short fuse.

Presenter22:13

I kept thinking, I remember in the first few films I made, my God, what happens if I suddenly uh find myself with this illness in right in front of the camera. So I was a very jaggedy, strange freak.

Presenter22:26

So you spent some years getting not very decent parts, but then Hollywood did come calling. First there was My Best Friend's Wedding with Julia Roberts, which was a big success. And then the next best thing with Madonna, which wasn't. You'd had your reservations about the project, but you'd been talked round and persuaded to take it on. When did you realise that it wasn't coming together as you'd hoped that it would?

Presenter22:47

Everything went wrong right from the beginning. I was rewriting the script with a friend of mine and we came over to see John Schlesinger, who was going to direct the film, who was an old friend of mine. And so it was very exciting. But when we were pitching to him what we were going to write,

Presenter22:59

He fell asleep. It was a big deal for me because I was behind the whole thing. And John had moved into this house and he'd forgotten the keys to his house. And Mel drove him home, and she got to his gate, which was about two meters high. And he said, oh, I've forgotten my keys. And she said, don't worry, I'll drive the car up to the gate and you can climb over. He's 72, by the way, at this point. And anyway, he climbs onto the bonnet of her car. He gets his two feet on top of the gate and jumps and breaks his ankle. So everything just kept on going wrong, really. When the film didn't work out, I mean, there was a certain amount of relish with which its failure was reported in the press. How was that to deal with? That side of it was okay. It was what happened in my career afterwards. It really came to a standstill. And the standstill was a little like an explosion that you see in outer space. You don't quite notice it's happened, but it was the end of something. It was a flash in the pan career at that point.

Rupert Everett23:37

In the

Presenter23:56

Time for next track. Tell us about it. It's a Joe Beam song called Decefinado, and I would love to have played two versions of it because George Michael also did an extraordinary version of it as well. The most beautiful version. But here we've got Stan Goetz and Joe Ghiberto.

Speaker 224:12

What affinity, I'm not sure.

Presenter24:46

Desafinado by Stan Goetz and Jao Gilberto. So, Rupert Everett, after The Next Best Thing flopped, you started writing to great acclaim. Did you ever think about giving up acting and just focusing on that? No, I always thought my dream was to try and get writing. You know, it was quite late in the day at this point. I was already 45 and I wanted to try and harness my writing and try and write myself a screenplay. I'm very lucky to have started writing. The mystery to me is why I couldn't have started writing earlier. And this is again to do with, I suppose, failure and being forced to pull yourself up rather than being so lucky you don't even bother. Do you think you had to go through the failure to grow with it? Maybe, but it's quite exhausting, and I've now got bitter jowls and dribble drains as a result. And I definitely have been embittered by failure in a way, which is not an attractive look in a 60-year-old. But then again, it's not an unuseful quality for a writer.

Rupert Everett25:31

You know, and uh

Presenter25:41

No, but anyway, the whole thing was very lucky for me because it gave me something constructive to do and then it started me off trying to write this story about Oscar Wilde. Yes, exactly. In a way, you were saved by Oscar Wilde. How did he take over your life? Oscar Wilde was always a lucky star for me. In my Glasgow days, we did a production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. That was a huge success for us. And then in my Hollywood moment, I did two Wilde films, and they worked very well for me too. So I knew that I was onto something. And when it came to trying to figure out

Presenter26:15

What kind of film should I try and make? It seemed to me that the Wilde story still hadn't been finished because all the other films about Wilde really take you up to the point where he goes to prison and the rest is a kind of footnote. And for me, the most exciting thing about Wilde as a fallen Catholic, I suppose, is the crucifixion. He was crucified and has been born again in a way. So I settled on trying to tell the passion of Wilde, really. And that's The Happy Prince. It took a decade to get the film made. What kept you going through that time?

Rupert Everett26:42

Syntaq

Rupert Everett26:44

What can be

Presenter26:46

Desperation mostly and blindness, never quite knowing how bad the situation was. And also when things did get very bad, then something good would happen. The show business is run on enthusiasm. We're very enthusiastic. If one little tiny thing happens, you think, oh there, that's a sign. I've got to keep going. And to come to the end of a project like that, a decade requiring all of your tenacity, all of your resources and as many favours as you could pull in, I think. What was it like when you got to experience the film's huge success? The beginning of my book, which is about the whole 10-year process, starts off with me having a dream of receiving my third Oscar of the Night. So your expectations were quite high then, really? Yeah, but that's normal. Everybody's expectations. That's what you want. Oscar Wilde is the beginning of the road to gay liberation. And he was the first person that you could look at on the street and say, that is a gay man. That hadn't happened before. And so I'd hoped that I would harness these 20 million American gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual Q pluses, and they would all go to my film and I would have Star Wars on my hands. And that palpably did not happen.

Rupert Everett27:22

And um

Rupert Everett27:24

So

Rupert Everett27:25

Where is the

Presenter27:54

But you must have enjoyed the great reviews and people's connection with it. I loved the great reviews and people's connection with it. That meant everything to me. Even if I do nothing else in my life, I feel that that has said it all in a way for me, that film.

Presenter28:07

Tell me about your next piece of music. My next piece of music is a piece of music I used in The Happy Prince and it's when Oscar Wilde is telling two little street boys actually that he's going to die. So it's his goodbye to everyone and it's the extraordinary and very weird prelude to Parseval which is very ghostly and beautiful.

Presenter29:28

Wagner's Prelude from Parsifal performed by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by Herbert von Karian.

Presenter29:35

Rupert Everett, you now live in the UK with your partner and your mother, Fettie. And my dog. And your dog. Yes, let's not forget Pluto.

Speaker 229:39

And my dog.

Rupert Everett29:42

Yeah.

Presenter29:43

Is it fair to say you live a quieter life these days? I work a lot, actually, these days. I do live a very quiet life. I'm not very social. I'm a kind of country blob most of the time, and I come up to town and get almost run over every time I cross the road. So how is it living with your mum? I live in her house, or she lives in my house, whichever one of us you're listening to. She's 85 and set in her ways, a Brexiteer, and I am 60 and set in my ways and a Remainer.

Presenter30:12

And there's obviously uh a certain amount of friction.

Presenter30:15

But also, it's great. Middle age isn't easy at the best of times. I think for actors it presents a a particular challenge. How have you found it? What's been your experience? I find it very difficult. There's some times in your life when the powers that be and you're doing a job, they just don't like what you're doing. And it's quite a tough thing, particularly in middle age, because when you're young, you kind of just say, up yours and keep going. But when you're older,

Presenter30:39

You tend to take on board things that people say to you more. And that was how one night I was doing this job this year, the people I was doing it for really just weren't enjoying what I was doing. And they were coming up to me saying, I don't think this is working. And it was very demoralizing. You know, it makes you think, oh, maybe I am now arriving at the sell-by date. And I got home that night, and it was in the summer, and I turned on the television, and it was Glastonbury. And up came Stormsey, and it was past my bedtime because I was meant to get up very early the next morning, but I just couldn't stop watching it from every single bit of it.

Presenter31:10

seemed to me to be that thing that we all want to do which is the total eclipse of the world. You know, we'd just had Windrush, we'd had Grenfell and here was this guy with the big arms in a bulletproof vest which was incredibly moving to start with and you felt truth emanating from him everywhere and it kind of just made me feel a lot better about things in general.

Speaker 331:34

Yeah.

Presenter31:35

So my last song is Stormzy.

Speaker 331:39

Man Chasse better than me. Tell my man shut up. Shut up. Mention my name in your tweets. Iruboy Shutter. Shut up. Better than me? Shut up. Shut up. Best in the scene. Tell my man, yo, yo, come man, call me a backup dancer. On stage of the Prince, I'm a backup dancer. If that makes me a backup dancer, I'll demand your bits. Demand your pics. Man, wanna chat about backup dancer? Big man like me with a beard, I'm a big man. How the f ⁇ can I f ⁇?

Presenter32:06

Stormsy and shut up. So Rupert Everett, I'm casting you away on your desert island in a moment. How do you picture it, I wonder? I think it'll be like Jamaica. So what, White Sand, Barnes? White Sand, Mountains, Coffee, Reggae, Anita Pallenberg, still alive, and me.

Rupert Everett32:14

Simple.

Rupert Everett32:15

Yeah.

Rupert Everett32:20

Still live and

Presenter32:23

Okay, so that's the vision. We will give you a few things to take with you. Not sure about Anita Pallenberg, but we will give you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and of course a book of your own. What would you like? Well, certainly not the Bible. I've had enough of it. I've had it up to there. I would take my favourite book, which is Travels with My Aunt by Graeme Greene. It's just works as my favourite book about the 60s, and I love Graeme Greene.

Presenter32:47

We can also provide you with a luxury item for your own pleasure or sensory stimulation.

Presenter32:53

I'm not really mad on luxury items much. I'd have uh some decent vegetables. Any particular ones that we can um courgettes, maybe, or cabbages. I think we can do cabbages. I mean, it's luxury score. Peas, I love peas. Peas and cabbages, yeah, right. You know, consider it done.

Rupert Everett33:04

Yeah.

Rupert Everett33:06

Please

Rupert Everett33:09

And corn.

Presenter33:11

Lastly, if you had to save just one of your eight disks today, which would you go for?

Presenter33:18

Oh, the pet shop boys.

Presenter33:20

Because they would make me feel that I was me.

Presenter33:24

Rupert Everett, thank you very much for sharing your Desert Island discs with us. Thank you very much for having me.

Presenter33:41

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Rupert. You'll have heard his thrilldom at hearing another castaway, Cressida Dick, choose his duet with Colin Firth as one of her eight discs. Colin Firth was sent to our island by Sue Lawley in 2005. Curtis Mayfield, and we people who are darker than blue, you've never been out of work since drama school, Colin, and that's quite a claim. You have not come up the hard way. You didn't sort of tread it out on the boards of Weekly Rep. Do you feel I sense there's a kind of guilt that you didn't do that? There is an unease, yes. I mean, I was brought up with a lot of Protestant values. You're supposed to pay your dues somewhere.

Speaker 234:05

The board

Rupert Everett34:11

There is an unease.

Speaker 234:11

This view.

Rupert Everett34:12

Yeah.

Speaker 234:12

Uh

Rupert Everett34:12

Uh

Speaker 234:12

Type

Presenter34:19

You know, perhaps your your soul needs a bit of hardship in order to develop, so I I do wonder when the catch has to come.

Speaker 334:22

But it's a developer.

Rupert Everett34:22

Uh

Presenter34:25

But tell me about I mean, you always wanted to be an actor. I think you announced to your parents when you were fourteen you were definitely going to be an actor, but you'd been acting what was the first time you ever went on the stage and felt the buzz?

Presenter34:37

I'm about five years old. Pantomime, infant school is somewhere in Essex, and I was Jack Frost, and it was a pair of silver satin pants, a blue satin sash, and portentously, a billowing white shirt. Were you a hit? I was. I don't know if I've been as big a hit since. And that's when I got the bug. That's where I thought where the love and attention lies. You remember recognising that, as well? Oh, God, yes. I mean, there was nothing else that gave me that sort of praise, that level of approval. Yes.

Rupert Everett35:07

Oh God, yes.

Speaker 335:08

I mean I

Presenter35:13

I didn't take kindly to being sent to school, to being sent into this rather cold environment where you're given lots of instructions and nobody loves you. You know, you're sort of on your own. I couldn't believe that I had to go back again the next day. I can remember that. I thought, my first day of school was over, thank God that's over. Now I can get on with my childhood. And it was a horrible shock day too. Suddenly, the environment of school warmed up around me. But you liked the idea of storytelling as well, didn't you? You liked the business of narrative. It's been absolutely what's driven me through life, I think. Even if you write a diary of what you did that day, suddenly your day looks different because it has narrative form. It has a kind of ending to it. It's quite childlike, that, in a sense, though, isn't it? That enjoyment, that suspension of disbelief. It's entirely childlike, and I think that the skills an actor has to have are childlike. I think unless you have that, you can't do it. But aren't you, as an actor, particularly doing movies, and particularly when you're a star, treated like a child, really? I mean, you're sort of told what time to come in in the morning and you're driven to work and you're put in the children. Oh, in every last detail, almost. I mean, you're an infant.

Rupert Everett36:17

Oh yeah.

Presenter36:20

But do you like that? Or do you find it deeply tiresome? Um I think it's

Presenter36:26

Absolutely appalling, really, in the end.

Presenter36:29

At 45, you realize there's something wrong with that. And thank God I've got kids, because you go home and the roles are reversed immediately. You can't say to your child, you behave yourself, I'm going to call my agent.

Speaker 236:39

Yeah.

Presenter36:40

Suddenly you're the slave and that does help. But I think a lot of actors I know by the time they're reaching my age are trying to take control in all sorts of ways. Colin Firth talking to Sue Lawley in 2005. There are over 2,000 editions of Desert Island discs in our back catalogue. Search for them via BBC Sounds or via our website. Next time my guest will be the writer of the big short, Michael Lewis. I do hope you'll join us then.

Presenter37:17

Henry Aikley disappeared from his home on the edge of Rendlesham Forest somewhere around the end of June twenty nineteen. Please, I just need you to get in

Presenter37:29

What we uncovered is a mystery that has sent us deep into England's past.

Presenter37:35

To an area steeped in witchcraft, the occult, secret government operations.

Rupert Everett37:40

Now we have multiple sights of five lights with a similar shape and opportunity.

Presenter37:45

And something that might indeed be altogether.

Presenter37:49

Otherworldly.

Presenter37:53

This is The Whisperer in Darkness. Available now on BBC Sounds.