Rupert Everett and The Next Best Thing
by Steve Pride
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Rupert Everett
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It's hard not to like Rupert Everett. He is smart, funny, handsome,
openly gay, hangs out with Madonna, and has a really cool accent.
His stunning portrayal of Guy Bennett in the 1984 film Another
Country, and his promising follow-up outing in 1985's Dance with a
Stranger, catapulted Everett to international stardom, but unfortunately
he had to wait over ten years for the spotlight to return with the 1997
box-office smash My Best Friend's Wedding. In between there were over
twenty interesting but forgettable films, an ill-advised attempt to
become a pop singer, and a well-publicized stint as a male prostitute.
Remarkably, Everett also found time to write two novels, including the
bestseller Hello Darling, Are You Working? which has recently been
purchased by New Line Cinema.
In his new film, The Next Best Thing, Everett plays Robert, a gay man
who has a few too many cocktails one night and wakes up in bed the next
morning with his best friend Abbie (played by Madonna). When she gives
birth to their son Sam, Robert and Abbie decide to live together as a
family. Perhaps not the most traditional family, but as the title
reveals, it's the next best thing.
Recently PopcornQ caught up with Rupert Everett at the fabulous Four
Seasons in Beverly Hills to get the 411 on his life, Madonna, being a gay
icon, and the new film.
PopcornQ: Being the only openly gay leading man in the known universe,
are you under a lot of pressure to be a role model? Pressure to choose
positive gay roles in uplifting gay films?
Rupert Everett: If I am, I'm going to ignore it, because political
correctness, even though I appreciate its value, is I think a lot like
reverse McCarthyism. You're not allowed to do something just because it's
not positive to a movement.
I don't think this is a gay film, as a matter of fact. It's about family
and love and parenthood. My character is gay and I think that he is a
very positive gay role model in that he is both a good person and a good
man.
I must tell you, in the original screenplay he was an asexual, flabby
interior decorator whose answer to every problem was to get some whip
cream out of the freezer and spritz it. That was his big bit. Hilarious,
right? We changed it by making him into just a man. An ordinary '90s
man who was gay, a practicing homosexual, and a great father. And that's
as far as correctness goes for me.
If political correctness is about not being allowed to explore the
humanity of a character, it's madness as far as I'm concerned, because it
doesn't make for good drama. There's no drama if you have to siphon off
all the color of personalities. I think it's just crazy!
PQ: I agree, but back to what you said earlier. You must admit The Next
Best Thing is going to be embraced by the gay community and labeled by
more than a few journalists as a gay film.
RE: I bet you it won't, thank you very much. But even if it were, I think
it's a movie about a family and what makes a parent. Anyway, I think the
term "gay movie" is kind of scary. What does that
mean? It gets off the video shelf and says "fuck me"? It's a movie where a
lot of the characters are gay -- but a
gay movie? I don't mind it being called that, but it's about parenthood
and love more than it is about being gay. Also it's about the law and
living outside the law. It's about what happens to anybody in this so-called
"free society" who lives outside the law, because you become like
a pair of trousers in the washing machine with a pair of
keys in them. You're lacerated as soon as you try to set yourself up in
any way outside the law. I think it does make the point that a gay man can
also be --
surprise, surprise -- from Middle America and the religious right. A gay man
can also be a really good, responsible parent. To that extent it's "gay,"
and I'd stand up for that. But I think it's about so much more.
PQ: The Next Best Thing explores alternative families without
sugarcoating anything, and there is a certain level of dysfunction that
creeps into the mix. Does that send out the wrong message about families
that are "different"?
RE: Something goes wrong in this relationship, just as things go wrong in
every other family, and by the end of the movie things are going to start
getting back on track. And obviously you do go against walls when you
have a situation like that, but you go against walls in every
relationship: straight, gay, whatever. There are always periods when the
whole thing seems to completely fall apart. But look at what's happening
now: there's Elian Gonzalez's situation in Miami, there's the Rolling
Stone cover with Melissa Etheridge and David Crosby. The definition of
"family" is going to change in this country.
The thing I don't like about conservatives and conservatism, and in
particular religious conservatism, is that they're always trying to take
us back in time. They say things were better then. Things were better
yesterday. We've got to get back. That is for me anti-religious because
otherwise we'd still be lungfish. Humanity is about a move forward
through things. And we have to take an overview and maybe the young
generation is always going to be ultra-shocking to the older generation,
but we can't have this sort of fascism about how everything should be.
Everything is going to change. And it always will change. When it stops
changing is when we all die.
PQ: Had you worked with Madonna before?
RE: No, never. But we were longtime friends.
PQ: Is there a danger in working with friends?
RE: The only thing I was nervous about was when you are working with a
friend it is sort of a sink or swim situation. Sometimes it goes very
badly. But fortunately it went really well between us, and we had a great
time. But we are both human beings. We're both quite difficult, high-strung,
and moody. But the good thing about her is that she can argue with
you and then forget about it quite quickly afterwards. My pet name for
her is "Mood Swinger."
PQ: What's her pet name for you?
RE: Muriel.
PQ: What aspects of your friendship are reflected in the film?
RE: Just the tone of our friendship, the whole irreverent side of it.
Funny enough, when we presented the studio with the scene where her
character Abbie has just come back from being dumped by her boyfriend and
I'm seemingly unsympathetic to her, they couldn't believe that we were
starting off on this note. They said, "You've got to be more supportive."
This is another case of the political thing in movies overtaking all
else. The gay character has got to be supportive from moment one. But in
fact, we were accessing the kind of friendship we actually have.
PQ: Speaking of working with friends, you cast your own Labrador
retriever Moe as the family dog in the film.
RE: Yes, he's quite old and after every scene would have to rest for a
week. But it was quite a thrill for me to have him in the film. When he's
gone I'll have the movie to remember him.
PQ: You play a gay father in The Next Best Thing. Tell me about your
bond with Malcolm Stumpf, the actor who plays your son Sam. The warmth
seemed genuine.
RE: Thanks, that is really great to hear. Malcolm is a really sweet boy
and I did get along very well with him. But I feel funny about kids in
the movie business. Because part of me thinks there's something too jaded
about the business for kids. The actual act of repeating something 15
times and all. I felt bad for him in a way. I didn't know whether he
wanted so much to act once he started. The idea of acting and the reality
of acting are very different things. And it demands a concentration that
kids really shouldn't have to have. But he was a sweet boy, very gangly
and charming. He's a vegan, which I didn't approve of very much. But we
did get on very well.
PQ: Has doing this film led to any thought of real-life fatherhood?
RE: No, not really. I'm too selfish. But just because you don't want to
do something yourself doesn't mean you can't be open to how great it is.
I adore kids. But by the time you are 40 you get very set in your
rhythms and your ways. I think that if it happened to me now, I'd step up
to it. And maybe in 20 years time I'd say, "That was the best thing
that ever happened in my life." But if I had to make the decision about
having a kid or not, I'd never take that decision in the affirmative.
PQ: What do you want audiences to take away from the film?
RE: I would like them to start reevaluating family values, and to
question what makes family. Blood isn't nearly as important as
commitment. Perhaps the most horrific idea of a father to most of America
is a gay man. And that's something I want to change. I want people to
become more open to the variations on family life and realize that things
aren't necessarily as they have always been. I think they are going to
change.
PQ: John Schlesinger made two films, Midnight Cowboy and
Sunday
Bloody Sunday, with some of the most memorable gay characters
ever brought to the screen. Did you give any thought to how your
character, Robert, would fit into this legacy?
RE: I certainly thought about that a lot. John and I did talk about it.
The gay community has changed a lot and one of the things that I wanted
to get across, and he agreed with me, was a more normal side of being a
gay man. You don't have to be an eccentric interior decorator to be
gay. You can be just an ordinary man. And I think one of the best things
about the two main characters in the film is that they're both just
normal people, in a way. Normal, yet fabulous.
* Read the PopcornQ review of The Next Best Thing!
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