An Ideal Leading Man?

Venice Beach, a weekday afternoon, the usual carnival of overdone flesh and orange hair, acolytes of the sun and the in-line skate jamming the boardwalk to the tune of boombox rap. Today, in addition, a winding line of white-sided equipment trucks and cream-colored trailers snaking into the alleys off the boardwalk identifies the immediate area as a MOVIE LOCATION, guarded by a phalanx of gym-conditioned young security guards in skin-tight shorts and combat boots, wearing wrap-around shades and trigger-ready expressions, all packing cannons on their hips. (Did someone say, “Madonna”?)

Somewhere in the glare of this late-century American scene is the incongruous figure of Rupert Everett, the high-born English actor and retro-handsome star of movies in which people still actually talk, an actor who might be God’s gift to the memory of Oscar Wilde and is not too shy to admit it.

That’s the legend of Rupert Everett anyway, that he is his own greatest admirer and a bit of a handful on the side. But on the strength of his performance as an effete Victorian bachelor in the new film of Wilde’s 1895 play “An Ideal Husband,” opening Friday, it’s hard to deny he brings a lot to the drawing room. Born to be Wilde, indeed.

On this day he’s working on a film with a latter-day bent, “The Next Best Thing,” cast as a man who prefers men in bed yet winds up under the sheets one drunken afternoon with his best woman friend, played by the aforementioned Madonna. When she gets pregnant, they decide to live together and raise their child in an end-of-the-millennium kind of family. John Schlesinger is directing. Everett and his writing partner, Mel Bordeaux, have had a hand in the script.

With his 40th birthday approaching, Everett appears on the verge of making history of a sort. Depending on how you assess his current status in Hollywood, he is or is about to become our first openly gay male movie star.

“I don’t think I’ve been particularly brave,” Everett says inside his trailer when the company comes in from the sand to break for a late lunch. His constant companion, an aging black Labrador retriever named Mo, pants nearby. “It’s never bothered me and I don’t see the point of lying about it. Lying is buying into other people’s angle, really, isn’t it? If what [gets you sexually aroused] is what guarantees you any success as an actor, then it really is the job of a tragic figure.” But he hastens to add, “But I’m sure it’s not. You can be an actor and be all sorts of things.”

*

When he first came to Hollywood in 1984 to promote his auspicious debut in “Another Country,” playing a gay English preppy who became a Russian spy, he was 25 and understandably reluctant to risk his budding career by outing himself. In interviews he denied that he was gay.

But a Hollywood career failed to materialize in any case, despite sustained encouragement from Orson Welles, who kept promising to use him in a picture that never got made. He fled Brat Pack-era Los Angeles for Paris, acted in European films we haven’t seen, wrote a semiautobiographical novel, signed on as a perfume model for Yves Saint Laurent, stopped saying publicly he wasn’t gay and even admitted that he’d once worked as a male prostitute.

This sort of candor is, to say the least, not all that common in Hollywood, where fortunes hang on at least the appearance of upholding community standards. But when he returned to America, Everett did so in winning fashion, as the unforgettable editor and confidant to Julia Roberts in 1997’s summer hit comedy “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” The role, that of a gay man who passes for straight in the hilarious subterfuge of a plot to derail a wedding, underscored Everett’s broad appeal as a Cary Grant-like figure who seemed above sex rather than defined by it. It was widely assumed he would get an Oscar nomination for the performance. He did not.

But he’s succeeded in getting a rare second chance in Hollywood, and this time around it appears his timing might be better. In addition to “An Ideal Husband,” he’s had roles in last year’s “Shakespeare in Love,” as the Bard’s competitor Christopher Marlowe; this spring’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as Oberon; and later this summer he plays the cartoon villain Claw in Disney’s live-action, kid-friendly “Inspector Gadget.”

A proven thespian and charm machine on-screen, there remains only the issue of his acknowledged sexual orientation in the big scheme of things--that is, can mainstream audiences who now embrace gay characters without flinching also accept openly gay actors in heterosexual roles? Will Rupert Everett ever be a leading man?

It may be that he will render such questions moot by carving out a place for himself in what amount to mainstream gay or sexually ambiguous roles, as he seems to be doing now. That in itself is something Hollywood hasn’t seen, not counting the older Ian McKellen’s Oscar-nominated star turn in “Gods and Monsters.” Evidence would include the film he is making here with Madonna, plus the one he wants to do with Roberts in which the two would play a top Hollywood couple, with him cast as a closeted James Bond-type action hero.

“An Ideal Husband” fits into this niche as well. In the opening scene, a naked woman gets out of Everett’s bed and hustles away before the eyes of a valet, establishing his character, Lord Goring, as a casual womanizer, but in all that follows we are left to wonder if, like Wilde himself, Lord Goring had more on his mind than women.

“He embodies some of the spirit of Oscar’s work,” says the film’s director, Oliver Parker, about Everett. “Even in terms of the ambiguity of his own character. We wondered, with his whole coming out, would people buy him in the role? But I think in the end he brought a useful ambiguity to it.” (The jury at the Seattle Film Festival last week named him best actor for his performance.)

“I only look at this as one only can,” Everett says, “from the standpoint of what you can do or are capable of doing, rather than talking about certain roles I’m not capable of playing.”

*

In his role as Lord Goring, Everett is a sterling-silver hood ornament for the idle rich, someone who excels at doing nothing until a good friend and member of Parliament (Jeremy Northam) calls for his help in squelching a financial scandal from his past that threatens to end his political career. Cate Blanchett plays Northam’s wife, Minnie Driver his sister (with designs on Lord Goring) and Julianne Moore a scheming divorcee who holds the key to the scandal.

“I think what’s exciting about it is how it mirrors the political scandal [in America] of this past year,” Everett notes. “Something that someone does in their past comes back to haunt them. I love Oscar Wilde. I’ve been in a couple of his plays. I’m a big Oscar Wilde fan.”

Himself an aristocrat educated at an exclusive Catholic boarding school in England, Everett brings such an air of erudition and effortless snobbery to his roles that you wonder if he could lower himself into a working-class character if need be. “I’m quite a good actor,” he says, “but I’m an actor who has a little area that I can do. I’m not an actor who can change completely. Probably. But I don’t think that stops me from playing working-class characters, certain types of them.

“People get cast for how they look and what they are for the most part. I kind of got pigeonholed and kind of did it. Quite happily, really. But I mean, I would definitely like to broaden my spectrum.”

“He’s not a poster child for gay people,” says a woman who works with Everett on dispensing information about him to the media. “He’s not Ellen DeGeneres. Quite the opposite. He’s a sex symbol to a lot of women. They love him at the women’s magazines. He’s a women’s magazine stud.”

Julia Roberts, asked to comment on his sex appeal to women, said by phone from the set of her new Steven Soderbergh film, “Gay or straight doesn’t matter any more than long-haired or short-haired. What’s so appealing about him is his intelligence and his humor. He’s incredibly smart. He energizes a moment. I just love to be around him and experience his ‘Rupertness.’ I think the planet is a better place with him on it.”

He is, of course, quite good-looking, even in person, his face a perfectly smooth advertisement for privilege, dominated by cool, dark eyes under sable brows and proud, pouting lips that seem poised to curl this way or that in exquisite disdain. And it can be said that, wearing a blue T-shirt and swimsuit, he still looks young and fit enough to model perfume.

But the assumption that beautiful people have reason to be happier than everybody else would seem to get a second-guessing from many who have observed Everett in moody discomfiture on movie sets and in interviews.

“And maybe they aren’t,” he says now, over the lunch of grilled tuna and vegetables an assistant has procured for him and a guest. “Sometimes it brings its own shackles, doesn’t it? Its own lack of peace.”

The “Rupertness” Roberts talked about so giddily and that one imagines from his comic performances is possibly attached to a side of him he is not showing today. He makes an effort to answer questions but does not allow himself to slip into mere conversation. True, he still has to do a scene with Madonna on the beach, but it’s one in which he doesn’t have to say much, if anything. And they are good friends, by all accounts. (“He’s very close to Madonna, which helps enormously,” reports Schlesinger.)

He is asked if he has a favorite scene in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the current release in which he frolics with Michelle Pfeiffer. “I don’t know. For me it was, you get through it, you do it. You’re always critical of the results. I mean, I liked it. I got to say some really nice poetry.”

Like Madonna and other members of the international show-business elite, Everett has various homes, in Miami, Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. Lesser mortals might wonder if it’s ever a practical challenge to keep track of that many residences, clothes and possessions? “Mine are very tidy,” he says. “They’re not big places. I don’t have many possessions, and I tend to travel with whatever I’m listening to or reading at the time.”

There is a long pause, and Everett says to his interviewer, “I feel this is difficult. We’re not kind of . . . it’s difficult to connect.”

“He’s an extremely smart man,” says Schlesinger. (Everyone, it seems, remarks on this.) “He’s very smart,” says Parker, who also says, “He can be quite arch. But he’s very honest.

“There’s a darkness to him that’s intriguing, a melancholy, a sense of loss with every passing moment,” Parker says, speaking not about Everett but his reading of Lord Goring. And yet. . . .

*

While he was finding it taxing to talk about himself, he became more at ease when the discussion turned outward to topics such as the questionable artistry of acting and the religious views of Oscar Wilde.

“I always feel uncomfortable with the term ‘artist’ when it comes to acting,” he says, taking a position little-heard in Hollywood, to be sure. “Actors are artisans, and they have techniques and they know how to achieve things and in my opinion you just try to do it. You see, I’m not a very Method-y actor. I’m one of those ones who just kind of does it, if you can. If I do a scene where I’m in a bad mood, I’m not in a bad mood for the next five days. . . .

“I’m not saying that performances aren’t artistic. After all, the people who built the gargoyles on cathedrals were called artisans and those gargoyles are very artistic. But the builder of the cathedral is the designer of the cathedral, not the artisan who put the gargoyles on.”

He beckons decorously to an assistant just outside the trailer. “Janie?” It’s time for coffee. “Cappuccino?” Why not?

In the scene that remains to be shot this afternoon, he and Madonna are hanging out at the beach with their son, five years into their very modern parenting experience. But Madonna’s character happens to have a new boyfriend, played by Benjamin Bratt, of “Law & Order,” and, in the small-world department, Roberts’ current beau. Everett will happen upon them building sand castles and notice uncomfortably that his young son is getting along famously with the new man in mom’s life.

At the moment, everyone is waiting for the sun to drop into the right angle.

A costumer knocks at the trailer door wanting to know if he wants to wear a robe in the scene. (He doesn’t.) A makeup person yells from out of sight that he’s needed soon. “Yes, I’ll come when I’m ready,” he shouts back.

“I love comedy of manners. I love people talking. I love American comedies of the ‘40s. William Powell, Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert. I would like to be in ‘90s versions of those kinds of movies. In one sense, this one [“Next Best Thing”] is like that.”

There’s still a little more to say before he gets back to the set. Not many actors--or anyone for that matter--would be able to tell you what Wilde thought about Jesus, but Everett has read a lot about Wilde.

“Oscar Wilde speaks beautifully about Jesus in general,” he says. “If you read the ‘De Profundis,’ his take on Jesus is extraordinary.”

His take being something to do with the state of grace represented by the ritual anticipation of Jesus’ second coming and the faith and serenity contained therein--not really what you expect to hear within boombox range of the Venice boardwalk.

And so, has he, Rupert Everett--lapsed Catholic, fashion-plate intellectual and outspoken actor--found any form of serenity through faith?

“No,” he says flatly. “I’m a total monster. But I think about it. I know the direction that I would like to go.”

Does he wish he were different? “I accept myself as I am. I wish I was better. Doesn’t everyone?”