Rupert Everett Lets It Rip

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MrsSpringsteen

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Didn't he do something similar a few years ago, he had a book out or something. "Al Pacino looks like a mad old freak" :eeklaugh: The Oceans movies are a cultural cancer?



Everett lets rip at Clooney (and Pacino, and Keaton, and ...)
By Amol Rajan
Published: 15 December 2007 UK Independent Dec 17th

Famed for his brooding disposition and stormy relationships, Rupert Everett has made as many enemies as friends in a career spanning two decades. But rarely has the actor poured as much indignation on so many colleagues in the film industry as he does in an interview published in The Independent Magazine today.

Speaking ahead of the release of his latest film, St Trinian's, in which he plays the headmistress of the eponymous school, Everett scorns a culture that he feels is undermining the best traditions of stage and screen. Film fans are being fed vast quantities of junk, he argues, rendering intelligent judgement and honest criticism all but impossible and "devaluing the currency" of good acting.

Everett has spoken of having sexual relations with men and women, although he maintains that he is gay. In today's interview, he attacks tinsel town's "homophobic" instincts, its shallow cult of "celebrity nonsense," and the "terribly promiscuous" tendencies of modern film.

But he saves his most brutal criticisms for some of Hollywood's biggest names, including Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. "De Niro, Redford, Keaton, Allen, Pacino ... They're all just tragic parodies of themselves," he says. "Al Pacino looks like a mad old freak now. I say give it a rest, or go and do some serious stuff."

Everett, who was born and brought up with his brother and maternal grandmother in Norfolk, was asked to leave his prep school for "being difficult," expelled from drama school more than a decade later for "insubordination" and claims his time at boarding school in the interim "calcified my heart". It seems old habits die hard. Conformity and Everett are not natural bedfellows.

"Our world is terribly promiscuous," he says. "The other day I saw a film called Because I Said So with Diane Keaton, and I thought, 'here's one of the women we loved most in 1970s cinema, debasing and humiliating herself in this load of trash'.

"Why? Because we're sheep, we just follow the herd ... It's just part of the huge amount of product that's put out now that's really bad. And it's our fault. We're all responsible for how the culture is. You can't draw a distinction between the celebrity nonsense on television and the film industry."

But he reserves his greatest fury for an unlikely object of hatred. "[George] Clooney thinks that, provided he does films which are politically committed, he's allowed to do Ocean's 11, 12, and 13", he says. "But the Ocean's movies are a cancer to world culture. They're destroying us."

And Clooney the man? "He's not the brightest spark on the boulevard. He'll be president one day. Mark my words, if he's straight, he'll be president."

Everett's Hollywood breakthrough came when he co-starred with Julia Roberts in the 1997 film My Best Friend's Wedding, playing her gay friend. Since then he has starred in several successful films for cinema and television, including Oliver Parker's The Importance of Being Earnest (2002) and the title role in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004).

Inspired by Oscar Wilde, who "pretty well invented the word 'homosexual,'" Everett says he is writing a screenplay of a film about the playwright and poet. He condemns The Judas Kiss, a play by David Hare documenting Wilde's infamous trial, on the grounds that Hare and the director, Richard Eyre, are not qualified to portray Wilde.

Everett insists: "I love David and I love Richard ... but not for that play." He adds: "Those people should never ever have thought about attacking the Oscar Wilde story, because they have no sympathy, or sensitivity, or sensibility. They're rigorously straight, the two of them. They cast Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde. Why? Because he's big and Irish!"
 
My goodness, somebody's girdle has grown too tight & it's making them cranky! :shame:


Seriously, though, Rupert.... tell us how you really feel. :wink:
 
"...huge amount of product that's put out now that's really bad...." :hmm: Didn't Rupert do "Hearts of Fire"? :yikes:
 
He was in My Best Friend's Wedding.

He can shut the fuck up, really.

You don't go dissing Serpico, Annie Hall, and Jake LaMotta on my watch, bub.
 
To pretty much say that Oscar Wilde's lasting achievement was to be openly gay is the single most absurd thing I've ever heard.

Everett, you may have played in a few of his plays, but you obviously know nothing about Wilde.
 
Fille Friday said:
To pretty much say that Oscar Wilde's lasting achievement was to be openly gay is the single most absurd thing I've ever heard.

Everett, you may have played in a few of his plays, but you obviously know nothing about Wilde.

Lol. Great avatar. :up:
 
Times Online UK

Hollywood has the moral compass of the Taleban or al-Qaeda, according to one of Britain’s best known film actors.

Rupert Everett, who made his name in Another Country before starring opposite Julia Roberts in the hit comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, cited the major studios’ attitude to women, gays, abortion and addiction to support his claim.

“Hollywood is a place that pretends it’s very liberal but it’s not remotely,” he told The Times. “It’s like Al-Qaeda.”

Everett, who is gay, believes that his sexuality has cost him “tons” of leading roles during his career. In his acclaimed and frequently outspoken autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, he claims that the head of MGM once vetoed his casting as the male lead opposite Sharon Stone in a film saying “to all intents and purposes a homosexual was a pervert in the eyes of America and the world would never accept me in the role and therefore MGM would never hire me.”

His recent voicework as Prince Charming in the Shrek films is “a role I would never get in a live-action film”. He does take the lead in his new film St Trinian’s, which arrives in cinemas later this week, but he is in drag as Camilla Fritton, the irresponsible headmistress of the anarchic girls’ boarding school

Earlier this month Jodie Foster joined Everett as one of the industry’s very few out gay stars when she publicly thanked her “beautiful” partner Cydney Bernard at an awards breakfast in Los Angeles.

However, her decision should not be seen as evidence that the climate for gay actors is becoming any easier, Everett said. “It’s the opposite. She is 45 and she just couldn’t be bothered any more.

“After a certain age you can be gay (in Hollywood). Before that it’s not only not good. It’s impossible.”

Making films in America is “like being in Afghanistan” in other respects too he added. Everett has been a friend and confidante to some of the most powerful women in the entertainment industry, including Madonna, Roberts and Sharon Stone.

However, despite the rise of actresses earning $20 million a film, such as Reese Witherspoon, Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz, he believes that Hollywood is still much easier to negotiate if your are a straight, male actor.

“The treatment of women there is quite extraordinary. If you compare being a 70 year old woman to a 70 year old man, the old woman will maybe get to play a grandmother. The old man will do a film with a 20 year old girl (opposite him).

“On abortion, (the studios) are for it in private because they don’t want actresses to clog up their schedules (by taking time off to have babies). But in films, if you get pregnant you have to keep the baby and end up with the man.

Abortion has barely registered in American films since the 1980s, when it tended to happen to minor characters, in backstreet clinics and end in agony or death.

Three of the most well-reviewed American films of 2007 deal with unplanned pregnancies. But where one in five American pregnancies ends in abortion, the characters in Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno all decide to carry theirs to full term.

It is different in Europe where Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake and this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner from Romania Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days are two recent prominent films to address the topic.

Everett is equally concerned by the double standards in the entertainment industry’s treatment of addiction.

“A 50 year old male drug addict will be supported. Everyone feels enormous compassion for them. Without naming names, female alcoholics and drug addicts are absolutely rejected. It’s not accepted.

“No one suggests that Robert Downey Jr (who went to prison twice while battling drink and drug problems) was really that crazy whereas Britney Spears is almost witch hunted.”

The industry’s hypocrisy and moral conservatism is rooted in the studios’ aversion to anything that might risk damaging the bottom line, Everett said.

St Trinian’s was an exception to the rule because of its relatively small budget and because Barnaby Thompson, who produced and directed it with Oliver Parker, is also the head of Ealing Studios, the venerable institution behind it. “The studio was Barnaby more or less,” Everett said. “It wasn’t made by a board of executives.”

“Most films nowadays are made by 20-30 executives who attack the writing and change everything. You can do much less in a film now than you could in the 1970s because the stakes are so high.”
 
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