Rupert Everett is fed up.
“I just am in despair about show business lately and the world in general,” the British actor declared. “We’ve all turned into greedy, envious, paranoid monsters in society, really.”
Dressed indifferently in a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves and blue-and-white striped cotton pants that at first glance looked like pajama bottoms, Everett bore little similarity to the elegant aristocrats he often plays. But as he gave a withering critique of popular culture, delivered in his trademark clipped tone, he sounded like an extension of his on-screen persona–self-assured, incisive and brooding; chafing against the constraints of an industry he says has lost its way.
“I’ve kind of retired,” said the famously outspoken actor, who says he plans to spend the next six months traveling the world, writing his memoirs. “I’m sickened by it.”
Well, he won’t be disappearing from view quite yet. After scene-stealing performances in hits such as “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Shakespeare in Love,” Everett can be seen or heard in several new projects: He’s had a recurring role on ABC’s “Boston Legal” this fall and will be the voice of the Fox in “The Chronicles of Narnia” movie out in December. He’s also agreed to voice Prince Charming again in the third “Shrek” movie.
And Sunday night at 8 p.m. on WTTW, he plays Sherlock Holmes in a new “Masterpiece Theatre” movie. The production is not an adaptation of the story by Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but an original script by “Prime Suspect 2” writer Allan Cubitt.
It’s Sherlock as a sort of “House” meets “CSI.” Not that either of those things were on Everett’s radar. “What’s ‘CSI’?” he asked when queried about Holmes as the granddad of fictional forensics.
The actor, a rare gay man who popularly plays both gay-friend roles and straight romantic leads, said he doesn’t watch TV, preferring to “read, talk, have sex, travel, exercise and look at people–you can spend hours observing people.”
But his real preoccupation lies with what he sees as the current wrongs in the world: the fixation on celebrity and commercialism; the short-lived outcries over catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina; and Hollywood’s furthering of a “wannabe society” obsessed with wealth.
“I think the movies and entertainment in general have been extremely corrosive to the structure of society with this culture of J.Lo and Tom Cruise, this culture of envy,” he said. “All these movie studios and television companies are so corporate and anesthetized and fearful and chasing the tails of the public, who are chasing their tails, in turn. It’s just a circle of nothing.”
Sherlock’s style
Rupert Everett won’t be observed in Sherlock Holmes’ traditional garb of deerstalker hat and Inverness cape and smoking a large, curved calabash pipe. Those familiar icons aren’t, Everett said, in the Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Nice to see a Holmes without the hat.
I reeeeally didn’t want to wear it. Actually, what I wanted to do, at the end of the film in the credits sequence, was to have him go into rehab (for his opium addiction) in the Swiss Alps … which is where he’d wear them, since it’d be cold.
This Holmes dresses in tuxedos and good-looking suits.
As a performer, you want to look good. And I wanted there to be a junkie chic to him.
Junky, like “shabby chic”? Oh, junkie. You meant junkie like opium addict.
I did. But also shabby, in an old but perfectly tailored suit. His clothes were old, some of them, but chic.–NEWSDAY.
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Edited by Curt Wagner (cwwagner@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
