How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Rupert Everett - 'Everyone is my Professional Nemesis'

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Rupert Everett is the best type of A-list guest. He’s been through the highs and the lows of fame and come out of the other side wiser, stronger, and with no qualms about speaking his mind. Plus his new book ‘The American No’ was born from failure (a collection of brilliant short stories that were TV and film ideas). We talked about: ‘learning to die’ professionally; his love for fragile but strong women such as Paula Yates (with whom he had a 6-year affair); coming out in Hollywood; Madonna; My Best Friend’s Wedding with Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz; why Oscar Wilde is a Christ figure, how drugs have ruined his brain and using hyper-sexuality as an escape. See, told you he didn’t hold back. Rupert’s new book ‘The American No’ is available now in all the usual places. Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Manager: Lily Hambly Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Tickell and Josh Gibbs Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage your audience and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place, all on your terms. I actually use and love Squarespace for my own website because it's so user-friendly. I also love a bit of merch. On Squarespace, you can actually design products and then the production, inventory and shipping are handled for you. You can also set up your own online store.

And Squarespace can even help you with flexible payments for your customers. And there's more! You can monetize your content by selling membership access to part of your website, and you can set up paywalls, so it's perfect for all of you entrepreneurs out there. Go to squarespace.com forward slash fail ten. That's F-A-I-L one zero for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use Fail10 to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that firmly believes all failure can teach us something

in the fullness of time. Before we meet our esteemed guest, just a quick heads up about our special bonus podcast. My guest stays on to answer your questions and we read out and offer advice on some of your failures too. This is part of our subscription called Failing with Friends, which also lets you hear my main episodes completely ad free. Here's a little bit of today's guest Rupert Everett. I think Bearing a Grudge sounds rather fun, all the grudges. Do join in by following the link in the podcast notes and you can send me an email or look out for my call-outs once a month on Instagram for your shorter questions. And you can listen to How to Fail on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa, play How to Fail

with Elizabeth Day on Amazon Music. The first film Rupert Everett saw in a cinema was Mary Poppins starring Julie Andrews. He was four and was so taken with both the movie and with Andrews that the experience would end up charting the course of his life. Or, as he put it in his memoir Red Carpets and Banana Skins, a giant and deranged ego had been born. After being sent to boarding school at the age of seven, Everett left at 16 to attend the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He was asked to leave after teachers deemed him a bad influence and made his way to Glasgow where he cut his teeth at the Citizens Theatre. His big break was starring as a gay pupil at an English public school in the 1981 play

Another Country, opposite Kenneth Branagh. Three years later, it was made into a film, a role that earned Everett his first BAFTA nomination. In 1989, Everett went public with his sexuality. It was a trailblazing move at a time when being a gay actor was seen as potentially career ending. But a scene-stealing turn in My Best Friend's Wedding opposite Julia Roberts proved the naysayers wrong. He went on to appear in films including An Ideal Husband, St Trinian's, and more recently, Napoleon. He's also in the later season of Netflix's hit show, Emily in Paris. His credits give you some idea of Everett's quicksilver talent, one that

is not just confined to acting. He has written five books including three critically acclaimed memoirs and this month he returns with a new collection of short stories, the American No, based on all the pictures Everett has done for movies that never got picked up. Now 65, he has said in the past that, success has come to me both too early and too late. I would have preferred it to have come in the middle in a more normal way. Rupert Everett, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you very much. What would have been a more normal way to experience success? Well, I think there's no normal way to experience success in a business as peculiar and as acid trippish as show business really, because it's so head turning when it happens that

it kind of catapults you up into the air and then you find you've got nowhere to stand, no ground beneath your feet. And the trouble with success is for the most part, there's always, it's a roller coaster, it goes up and it comes down. And it's quite often very difficult for people to change with the degree of success. You become the successful person,

then you become a failure, but you want to stay the successful person. Everyone else is treating you as a failure, and then there's a conflict there. You have to really roll with the punches. And I think it teaches you quite a lot. It teaches you about death in a funny way, because you have to die to what you were before. That's the only way of surviving success, and it's ensuing failure. If you go on acting like you're Elizabeth Taylor when you can't get a job, you'll be in constant conflict with everybody. So you have to cut your cloth according to how other people see you. And I think that's a very interesting thing about personality too, because it only exists in other people's eyes really, what you are,

and you have to be it. Or you have to force them to make you believe in your version of things. It's complicated. Because you've also said that you feel you learn the mechanics of fame too late, which I thought was a very interesting phrase. Yes, because I think it's almost impossible to learn the mechanics when you're young. You're seduced into success by partly luck, partly probably a bit of talent, and then suddenly once it's happened, your life becomes a kind of inverted glitter ball where you have a company of your own goons, including your mother, who are too afraid to say anything to you or kind of charging on as a success. And the

mechanics of it are that in fact it's very fragile and you have to keep watching it, you have to keep making diplomatic bridges with people, not burning them. And success kind of often encourages you to do the opposite. Why did you burn so many bridges? I don't know whether I burned so many bridges. I was just, I was a complicated young man. And I think I believe my own PR a little bit too much, you know, in a way.

And so I took myself too seriously. I had a very good moment and it didn't really last. I wanted to go to America and I wanted to be in mainstream American films and just there wasn't a place for me as I was then. I was six foot four, size zero. I was very exotic for the world of that time. If you think about the early 80s and you look at, for example, perfume ads. They were all men with big handlebar mustaches and kind of hairy chests.

And it was a very male, male world in the show business world. So I was much too much. I looked like a cross between Anne Frank and Snow White. And I was really, there wasn't a place that I could have inhabited. Later on, I came at the wrong time slightly because if I'd been around at the end of the 90s, say, as a young person, the kind of thing

that I could do was more applicable somehow. I'm very interested in people who get sent to boarding school at a young age. I got sent to boarding school myself at 10. I've just read Charles Spencer's book about the emotional cauterization of that. And given what you've gone on to do in your career, acting, writing, directing, a lot of that is about bringing emotion to the surface, to the screen, to making it understandable. Do you think that the way you've lived your life subsequent to being sent to boarding school is a sort of reaction to that quarterization. Boarding school was for me, it had bad things and good things. I think the actual moment

of being separated from my mother was an extremely big kind of earthquake in my life. And I think that did precisely what boarding schools were meant to do. It does kind of quarter in my life. And I think that did precisely what boarding schools were meant to do. It does kind of quarterize, it calcifies your heart somehow. It makes it hard. And that's what they were designed for. They were designed for empire rulers to then go out and rule in the empire without so much emotional baggage.

Of course, by the way, emotions weren't quite so popular when I was a kid as they are now. And I think in a way we've gone too far with emotions. I'm so bored with everyone bursting into floods of tears nonstop at the drop of a hat. I rather respect the kind of world that I came from, which was one that held your emotions in. And I think for an actor, it's quite good not to have

your emotions inside you and to have to really bore into yourself to get at them in a way. Eliezer So talk to me about failure. Do you think you're friends with failure now? Because The American No is in many ways a book of failure, although I'm sure it will be very successful. Richard I think failure, for me, failure has always been the best motivation that I've ever had. Everything that's good that's happened to me in my life has really happened to me through failure on the whole. One of the most lucky things in a way that happened to me, I got a job to go to live in Russia for two years when I was about 34. And only because I just couldn't get arrested anywhere else, I took the job.

And I think it was a life-changing thing for me, being in Russia just before the collapse of communism and living there for so long. It saved me and it really fertilized something in me that took me on for another 15 years after that in a way. So I think failure is a great manure. Tell me more about Russia.

What were you doing there? I got a job playing in a film directed by a very famous Russian director called Sergei Bondachuk. And he loved this book called Quiet Flows the Dawn by a man called Sholokov. This book is a very, very famous book in post-revolutionary Russia. It was the only book about white Russia that Stalin allowed to be published. And actually, when you go down Russia, about halfway down from Virognezh onwards, everybody in their car has a picture of my character in this

film in their car. And he was a macho Cossack, and everybody in the show business world had been off of the path. And at the bottom of the list was me. And they all turned it down because in the Soviet system, there was only a start date to a film and never a stop date because they just went on until they finished. So everyone turned it down and I got the part. And it was the most extraordinary adventure I've ever been on. Very hard in a way. I lived in a little flat in Moscow. There weren't shops there. We were there when it actually all ended, but it wasn't a comfortable

place to live really, but it was amazing. I really flourished in that place and my prep school education stood me in very good stead to be able to enjoy it, I think. What was it like being a gay man in Russia? Well, worse being a gay man playing this part that everybody in Russia saw as their hero. I think when the director found out that I was gay, it was worse for him than the end of communism really. And he found out in a very strange way because I brought with me from France this boy that

I knew who could do cooking. And he was like a little tiny pixie. And he had a collection of Barbie dolls, which he brought with him to Russia. And when I asked the directors for dinner the first time, and Bondachuk was, he won Artist of the Soviet Union twice. He was the real, the big director. He started Mosfilm, he did War and Peace, he did Waterloo, he was a very important person. And when we arrived in my flat, the first thing I saw was a Barbie hanging from the

kind of lampshade. And then I looked into the bathroom and sitting on the loo roll was another Barbie. And then on the sofa in the sitting room were five Barbies. And I was desperately trying to get rid of these Barbies as he came in. And I went into Brunner who was doing the cooking in the kitchen, I said, what are you doing with all these Barbies? And he said, oh, relax, tell them they're mine. But when Bondachuk found out that I was gay, I think he, uh, he was at first,

you know, really very depressed, poor thing. Well, you told me that anecdote because we were talking about failure. So do you categorize it in the failure realm? I would never have got that job if I hadn't been a failure. Right. Because I would just never have done it. I'd have been doing something fabulous. In my fantasy, I would have been doing risky business too in Hollywood or something instead.

What I got was this job in Russia. For 19 months we were there. It was kind of the making of me through that, through not having those other jobs. Do you speak Russian? I spoke a bit when I was there. I've forgotten it all now. It's very complicated. I learned Italian from it because our crew was Russian and Italian and I was the only person who spoke English. So there was no language for me to speak and Russian is very complicated. So I learned Italian mostly. Before we get onto your failures, I would love to ask you an incredibly cheery question, which,

I mean, you said earlier that idea of being in movie jail, that idea of fame being removed from you is a kind of death. How do you feel about actual dying? Death, I think is exciting. Dying, being sick, going to the hospital, having chemotherapy or followed by immunotherapy, followed by radiotherapy is really tough and that's a different thing. I don't know how I feel about that

because I hate pain, I hate feeling bad and I see so many people around me going through it. I'm not a courageous person on the whole, so I don't know how I would manage to deal with that side of things. Death itself is a thing to look forward to in one sense. I feel very much now in this world, I'm completely out of my depth. I really don't anymore have a clue about anything. So in one sense, you do feel like a kind of pre-revolutionary character, tottering all the elves at the end of Lord of the Rings in the appendix when they're all kind of left in Middle Earth and desperate to get the last train to the coast, like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in

Don McClade's American Pie. So death, I think, is an excitement. Illness is the hard thing, I think. Do you feel sad about that lack of understanding, as you put it, of the world that we currently inhabit? I feel very sad about the impotence of old age in the world now, because I don't think anyone's particularly interested in what an older person has to think about the world. You're sitting on the sidelines of what feels to me like a kind of collapse that's very upsetting. so kinetic and waspish and funny and deep and all of the things. And it feels so youthful. It feels like you blaze through the world like a sort of whirling dervish. And I wonder, is that Rupert still in you?

No, I don't think that Rupert is in me anymore. First of all, because that Rupert really didn't ever count the cost of anything. You know, we live in such a peculiar world for just speaking out and talking and saying your mind. You have to be very careful because everybody has become so emotional and emotionally charged. The grief that people cause

by saying something they just think. I don't feel like charging through things now. Well, let's charge through your failures. Well, let's charge through your failures. Okay, we can charge through my failures. Your first failure is the making of The Happy Prince. So The Happy Prince was a film that you directed. You were very passionate about it. It's all about Oscar Wilde.

The failure of it was what then happened to it once I presented it. It didn't work at the box office and that then becomes a huge failure because the only thing that works in show business is success. I think the film is a remarkable film. It's a wonderful film. The making of it was a wonderful experience. I mean, it's really tough. It took a long time to make.

But show business is not a game for those who bleed easily. People don't really understand. You've got to have a robust and thick skin. So I wouldn't call the process of it a failure for me. No, the process of it was a great success. It's pretty well crafted, beautifully lit, designed, acted. It's a really compelling portrait of an artist, Oscar Wilde. It's very truthful.

I think it was another thing rather like going to Russia, making it through it, managing to keep pushing and keep with an idea, which really before I'd never done and followed it through and followed it through to fruition. I think that was a great success for me because it's something I'd never done really before. I'd given up on so many things. All these stories in my book, they're all quite good stories. I gave up on them. As soon as you face the first three or four rejections,

you think, oh, give up. And of course, that's not what you have to do. Do you think you were like that in relationships too? I didn't ever want a relationship to go on for very long when I was young. I always thought, you know, like I always thought there's something better around the corner. That was my trouble in relationships. I was very dodgy in relationships. When did you realize that maybe there wasn't anything better? It was that I didn't feel so restless with myself. I think thinking there was something better wasn't really that I didn't feel so restless with myself. Thinking there was something better wasn't really that I was thinking there was something better. I think it was growing into

one's sexuality at that point when it was, you know, it was after all borderline illegal still when I came out as gay in the late 70s. It had only been legalized in 1967. Even after its legalization, the police kept on with their raiding and arresting and stuff like that, so it didn't feel very legal. I think coming to terms with that really was what made relationships become possible. So my feeling of there being something better somewhere else was really a feeling about myself not being able to deal with it, I think. That was so beautifully expressed. And you've never been to therapy?

No, thank God. I'm not bored enough yet. I might start now though. This might be it. This might be your single therapy. I wouldn't mind going to couples therapy. Oh, on your own or? No.

I think couples therapy is the one that really does sound like it makes a lot of sense because when you're in a couple, no one listens to what the other person is saying or they hear something completely different. I think personal therapy is not for me. I'd rather work it out myself. This restlessness that you talk about, how long do you think it took you to inhabit and feel all right inhabiting the fullness of who you were and are in terms of your sexuality? Well, it was connected with so many other things, my sexuality, because I loved also club culture,

drug culture, I became a leather queen. And so there were lots of decoys that made it not necessary to really face yourself because you can keep going for quite a long time doing all those things and squeaking around in your full leather outfit going to fabulous dungeons across Europe is enormous fun and it means that you can put off facing yourself to a certain extent. I became more normal in a way in those kind of areas in my mid 40s late 40s, I suppose and You know, I stayed a teenager really till the age of 50. That was a choice I made and in terms of failure I

thought Sexual Liberty being a highly charged sexual character was somehow going to liberate me from a very kind of militaristic middle-class background. And in one sense, it did smash all that, but in another sense, it became its own kind of prison and everything was related to that. My whole career was really related to being attractive to some guy in the audience. I could have done better at my work if I had concentrated harder on that rather than on trying to be some sexual being across the footlights.

And how much do you think that's your failure and how much is it a broader failure that Hollywood, the industry that you were in, wasn't ready for an out gay actor to play leading roles? I think it's a bit of both. What I wish for myself now, for example, I'm a fairly good stage actor. I think I should have devoted more of my time to fine tuning that. And when I did it to being more serious, when I mean, I behaved incredibly badly several times when I was a West End actor. You do long runs in plays in the West End. I did about four of those in my youth

and I behaved terribly badly in them. And it's the thing that I find now incomprehensible. It would be something I would never ever do. In other words, I've now grown up and I regret not that I didn't work hard because I did work hard, but I didn't work hard in the right direction always. And it was always the slant of it was always presenting myself as this available sexual being. And I think there was more to me and to the world than that. The Hollywood and everything like that, that's another issue. And yes, that was always going

to be difficult for me, particularly with my physique. I was six foot four, I was incredibly thin. I didn't actually look that good. My face looked very good, but the whole of me together looked rather alarming, like an insane kind of giraffe character. You've got to fit in. You've got to eclipse with the world, and I didn't eclipse really with the world. I did in a way. One of my other failures is I turned down the wrong types of jobs sometimes too, I turned down the wrong types of jobs sometimes too, because I was desperate not to just be upper class guy in a Merchant Ivory film, but I should have been really. It would have been better. Now, are you a business to business marketer? If so, you know how noisy the ad space can

be. Would you like a marketing platform built specifically for you to streamline the whole process? Of course you would! That's LinkedIn Ads, the platform where you can cut through the noise by precisely reaching the professionals who are more likely to find your ad relevant. Target your ideal audience by job title, industry, company, and more. You'll also have direct access to a billion members, including 180 million senior-level executives. Plus, you'll be able to drive results with measurement tools built specifically for business

to business. In technology, for example, LinkedIn generate two to five times higher return on ad spend than other social media platforms. Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com forward slash HTF to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com forward slash HTF.

Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn. The place to be. To be. curious people who want to learn more about the world around them. Every day you'll learn something new about things you never knew you didn't know. Subjects include history, science, geography, mathematics and culture. If you're a curious person and want to learn more about the world you live in, just subscribe to Everything Everywhere Daily wherever you cast your pod. Do you have, did you have any professional resentments or professional nemeses? Not when I was young, much more now. Tell me, who are they? Well, everybody, you know, you become as you're when, when I was young, I was, I was rather congratulated myself on never being jealous of anyone. But it was basically because more or less, I to keep my you know crazy train on the tracks

Somewhere I always found a career somewhere now When you're older my whole generation of young floppy-haired boys You know now geriatrics and we're all clawing for the same part Some with more success than others. I won't mention any names, nor mine, but so I feel more jealous now than I ever did when I was young. Returning to the happy prince, you have said in the past that you feel in communion with

Oscar Wilde. Why is that? When you discover yourself sexually, you start looking for role models in that area. And obviously Oscar Wilde was one of the first ones. And I think for me, as a Catholic, or as a lapsed Catholic at least, which is kind of the same thing anyway, I think that Oscar Wilde is the Christ figure in the sense that he martyred himself for his sexuality, and rather like Christ, he died not so that our sins could be forgiven, but so that his death was really the beginning of the road to liberty. In other words, before Oscar Wilde, there was not a face to homosexuality.

It wasn't even called homosexuality much. It was called being inverted, and it was something nobody talked about. Certainly not a woman, and men only in strictest privacy. But once Oscar Wilde was flatfootedly kind of columping down the boulevard in France, you could point at him because he was famous and say that is a homosexual man. And so it finally had a face. And I think his crucifixion at the hands of society is what bore the road to gay liberation. So he's a very important, he is a very important character for everything that's become LG,

whatever, BTQ, all the other things. He's the 20th century beginning of that road, in a way, I think. Have you ever had a spiritual encounter with him? Has he ever come to you in your dreams or have you ever spoken to him through a psychic? I did go and see once. I definitely have a connection with him and I became great friends with his grandson and I feel a very peculiar connection with him, Merlin. I feel that if you really read a book with all your attention, it's rather like going to a seance.

If you really attend to a book, you're summoning up the spirit of the writer. You're going back to the moment they thought up the lines. I felt that with a lot of books, actually, that I felt a connection with the writer, and particularly Oscar Wilde. How guilty do you feel? I don't feel guilty anymore. I think I did feel guilty when I was younger, but you kind of run out of steam with guilt. It's so exhausting that after a bit, you just don't have the energy to keep feeling it, I think.

And as one gets older, one of the great things about having less energy is you do have to discard things that are clunky. And I think guilt is one of them. It's a complete waste of time. What's the best drug you've ever taken? I don't know. I mean, I can't lie and say I haven't enjoyed lots of drugs.

I don't regret my drugged days. What I do fear for is my own brain. And as I get older, I'd like to keep it as long as possible and I can feel it going a little bit blurry at the edges already. And I think that could be partly to do with blitzing so much on nights taking 10 ecstasies in clubs and stuff like that, which is really not good for you. That drug I don't enjoy actually looking back on it. I think it's difficult now because now the only drug I like taking is gummies and marijuana oil, but mostly to sleep. Um, and marijuana oil is quite good for glaucoma, which is an eye condition that I have, and I find that is a, is a very nice drug.

You don't have any of the problem of your lungs and smoking and, but at the same time, really now I, I would like to be lucid. You're coming across as incredibly lucid. Well, good. I'm not very lucid actually, but I want to be more lucid. The American No starts with an incident where you encounter a Hare Krishna who was a former Hollywood producer. Is that true? Yes, it is. That's amazing. Well, it's a great way to start the book. Okay. Your second failure

is, it's a failure around friendship. And as we know, the way that we deconstruct failure means it's not really a failure at all. It's just something that's a teaching experience. But I was thinking in particular of your friendships with iconic yet fragile women, with Paula Yates, with whom you had a six-year love affair, and with Isabella Blow, and they sadly are no longer with us. I wondered if at some level you felt wrongly, but understandably, that you had failed to save them. LH – Isabella, I was in contact with a lot when she was waning. They weren't on my list of failures, to be honest. But now that you're asking, there is a feeling when people are quite crazy. Isabella was determinedly crazy. And I remember going out with her once, she was in this awful nursing home,

a really horrible place. And I took her out for lunch a couple of times from there. And she just, she was doggedly wanting to go down. At a certain point, you kind of felt that, well, there's nothing I can do. And you kind of, I suppose in a way, you kind of, I suppose in a way, withdraw yourself sometime. But I didn't actually. We went to India together and had a hair-raising time while she was kind of on the rails, off the rails. You know, everybody does what they can.

I mean, the thing is with your problems in the end, you are quite alone with them. Everyone's miles away, even if you're sitting close by. With Paula too, I didn't see much of her at the end of her life, and when I did, it was quite hard to get through to her sometimes. So I don't feel exactly a failure. The people you're able to be really supportive to, that's just how it happens or it doesn't happen. And it's quite often to do with being close to them, being physically close, being around.

I was slightly around for Isabella. I was not around for Paula. She was in a different world really when she got, really after Michael. They were in their own world. Michael Hutchins. And she had her children and so I wasn't really very involved with her as she was flailing. LH – Both Paula and Isabella lived with challenging mental health issues and addiction issues and that's ultimately what ended their lives. If anyone is listening to this right now and they

have a friend or a loved one in a similar situation, what advice might you give them? I thought that was, I was very struck by you saying just physical closeness is sometimes important. Richard It's a difficult thing. It's a kind of luck of the draw. Yes, if you're there and you happen to be close by and you see someone all the time, it's a horrible thing to watch whose mental situation has got beyond them taking it in hand and then beyond everyone else. There's a wall up. It's terribly upsetting because they want to get to the other side of the wall, you want to get to the other side of the wall, and nobody can. Life takes you on, you know, chutes, and we all have to watch out for that before it's

too late in our lives. Because at a certain point, it's quite exciting, slaloming down towards a kind of, you know, lack of control and then towards insanity at the very beginning. But once you've gone a certain distance, it becomes impossible to turn back and it becomes impossible for anyone's hand to be strong enough or long enough to pull you back. And I think that's the thing that's really awful about those kinds of situations, that people become beyond helping in a way. And then they get involved in those hospitals and places. Isabella went to so many weird places. I don't think any of them really helped her do anything very much. Electric shock therapy, I think,

helped her a little bit for a time, but not much. LR The way you have written about Paula in the past is it carries a very specific kind of beauty. The connection that you had seems almost otherworldly. I think she was otherworldly in a way. Paula was, when I first met her, she was the most exquisite creature and very strong but also very fragile, very funny, very humorous, very pretty, but with a kind of funny wonky teeth. She had a very kind of twitty pie-ish forehead that was actually very vulnerable forehead. And she was such a lot of fun. When she liked you or when you were her thing, the attention you got from

her was just incredible. I'd never really received that kind of attention before. I was doing a play with Gordon Jackson. He was Mr. Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs. He was a wonderful, wonderful actor and he was married to a lady called Rona. And we were doing this play and I was going out with Paula at the time and he didn't realize that Paula was actually married to somebody else. And he asked us out for dinner. And I remember going to this dinner in a restaurant with him and his wife.

And I just suddenly realized, you realize how being part of that kind of heterosexual world, everything fitted in so well. And they were talking to us about where we're going to get a mortgage and all that kind of stuff. And it just felt very, very cozy. And Paula's was extraordinary and her spirit was extraordinary. And I suppose looking back, I didn't realize because you didn't really think about this, but I suppose she was very damaged by probably her childhood and all those kinds of things. She was the most amazing woman. I adored her.

Is she the only woman you've ever had an affair with? No. Oh, who else? This is not about my affairs. It's about my failures. Well, they might be the same thing sometimes. Did you feel that you were two parts of the same person? With Paula? Yes. No, she was always an exotic creature to me.

She was like a kind of strange animal out of the jungle. Cat, feline, leopardish type of person. But, or abandoned leopard or something. I don't know what she was like. What kind of animal are you? Oh, a panther. No, I don't know. I'm not sure what kind of... Now, I'm kind of an old lumpy dog. Oh, a Rupert. No, but it's lovely being an old lumpy dog.

It is lovely. Okay, good. as long as you were okay with it. Yeah. Yeah. Saturdays are for sunshine, especially for your ears. With another election, ongoing wars and natural disasters, we know the news can be a lot to take in, and we're determined to share the bright side of humanity. Every Saturday, take a breather from the headlines and hear all the uplifting happenings

across the world with 5 Good Things. Listen to 5 Good Things on your favorite podcast app. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 El Salvador? How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s. Well, what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab? Or why the Japanese Yakuza have all those crazy dragon tattoos? I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Golds. And we're the hosts of the Underworld Podcast.

We're journalists that have traveled all over reporting on dangerous people and places. And every week, we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world. We know this stuff because we've been there. We've seen it, and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it. We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field, and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The Underworld Podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Talk to me more about friendship in general. Do you think you're a good friend? Your friendship isn't like a kind of medicine that you give out in teaspoons of. So I think you'd have to ask someone else about that.

One of your most famous films is about friendship, My Best Friend's Wedding. How do you feel about that movie now? I love it. So do I. It makes me cry whenever I see it because it's such a, for a start, it was such an extraordinarily lucky moment in my life

where, you know, it's so rare that you throw double sixes two or three times. That was the time when I really threw double sixes a lot because I got that part. I made great friends with the director, I made great friends with the actors. My part really kind of shone in the film and I got a lot of opportunity from it. It was a great, great moment in my life. I'm so happy that you still love it. Oh yeah, I adore it. I love that film so much.

I watched it again recently. It's wonderful. It's a brilliant, brilliant film. I think in terms of the type of movies that I loved when I was growing up, you know, from the 30s, the 20s, the 40s and 50s, this is as good as all those great Billy Wilder films as well. I think it's a PJ Hogan is a wonderful director and that film is a great classic. I was also fascinated to learn from your memoir

that the dynamic in the film between Julia Roberts' character and Cameron Diaz's character was actually sort of playing out between the two of them, certainly from Julia's perspective, offset. Well, I didn't know that it played out, but you're playing for very high stakes when you're those kind of girls. The fact that they both managed to win in that story is quite remarkable, I think from

PJ Hogan's point of view, because normally there'd be one winner in that story and it would have probably been Julia because Cameron's not quite so focused in that way. But I think they both came out of it quite equally in that film. They were both brilliant in it, I thought. Your final failure is another movie, also stems from Friendship, The Next Best Thing. Tell us about that movie. That was a car crash because the sad thing about The Next Best Thing was that it really was my movie. It came to me after my best friend's wedding. I was very popular in Hollywood for that year.

It was made by Paramount. The movie was greenlit because I was going to be in it. I managed to persuade Sherry Lansing, the head of Paramount, and the producers that I could rewrite the movie, which I did with my writing partner of the time. I also hired John Schlesinger to be the director, which was, I think in hindsight, well, it was a mistake because then he wanted me to stay with him and help him prepare the movie and I went off and did another job. So that was an example of me not really following the ball exactly because possibly I could have stayed with him during the pre-production and structured

the film as I thought it should have been. But it rapidly flew out of control. At a certain point I remember I was fired as the writer, fired as the producer, and the producer said to me, and if you want to stay as the actor, you can the producer, and the producer said to me, and if you want to stay as the actor, you can, but don't if you don't want to. I should have probably walked away from it at that point, and I didn't. It was not a failure as such really at the box office

because of video sales in those days. Madonna sold a lot of videos, but the film itself didn't work, even though for a long time it was the only film that dealt with this issue that was actually then happening and being born. Tell listeners if they're not familiar with the movie, what the premise is.

Oh, the premise is a girl who is worrying about whether she's ever gonna have a baby is dumped by her boyfriend and gets drunk with her gay best friend, and for some reason, they start having sex, and then she is pregnant. And they think it's theirs, but little unbeknownst to him, she also has sex one more time with the person who dumped her, who has come back to collect his things,

and she tries last-d ditch attempt to seduce him, which she does, and it's his baby. And so it's a good story. Gay parenting, gay marriages, gay people having babies with friends, all this was just about to start, and really for a long time, that was the only film that ever really talked about that. And so I think

it's not as much of a car crash as it seems. John Schlesinger wasn't well making it. He had an accident a month before, broke his ankle and then he broke his, everything went wrong really in the making of it. And it completely finished things for me in Hollywood. LW You mentioned that Madonna plays the other lead role and you were very good friends at the time. Did that work? I mean, was it helpful having Madonna in the film or do you think that ultimately that had a part to play in how it was received? MG I think it's very difficult for her to be in films because everyone has such a preconception and I don't know how she could ever be good enough

to make people say, oh God, that's really good. I think it was great having her in the film. I think she was touching in the film too, myself. I haven't seen it for ages though. I mean, every time that comes on, I kind of look the other way. Right. And you say that you think it finished things

for you in Hollywood. Yeah, no, it really did. I think it knocked things on the head for me in Hollywood, definitely. How much do you think that was to do with Hollywood not being ready for those themes? I think Hollywood was ready for those themes. They weren't ready for failure within those themes.

They're never ready for failure in general. I think maybe you get more chances in other types of failure. That one, I think people thought it was going to be a big success, and then when it wasn't, the whole thing was quite big. The failure was quite big. It could have been a smaller failure if it had been a more normal thing. But it turned into a big failure. Did it feel awful at the time for you?

Yeah, awful. I was very much enjoying my Hollywood revival. And like all idiots, I thought it was just going to go on forever and then it didn't. So it was difficult to adapt to. And how did you end up adapting to it? It's that thing of learning to die. You have to learn to die and you have to learn to rebirth yourself. And sometimes the rebirth takes a lot longer or never comes back because when a world like that

zips up behind you, it becomes almost impossible to find a way back into it. Do you think that that led you to writing books? Definitely. Right. And the sadness for me in terms of writing is I don't know how I couldn't have learned to do it properly before, because if I'd managed to write my script about Oscar Wilde before the next best thing,

but after my best friend's wedding, it would have been produced for $25 million as opposed to 12. It would have probably been made for Miramax. It would have probably gone to the Oscars and the outcome would have been different to it. But anyway, my journey wasn't that. I only learned really to write after that failure. The manure for my writing career, the fertilizer was that failure.

So that's what the universe threw at me. And it was a rebirth that wasn't quite so easy, but worthwhile at the same time. Well, I'm very grateful to that manure because you are an exceptional writer. Thank you very much. I don't think I am. I think my weakness as a writer is I'm a writer rather like an actor. Every book I've written, I've thought to start with, when I wrote my first memoir, I chose a book that I wanted it to be like. So in other words, I approached it really

as an actor would approach a role. I loved the books of David Niven, "'Bring on the Empty Horses and the Moon's a Balloon." So I used him as my kind of reference. So I think I'm becoming a better writer and you know, you keep growing as you keep going. How did the next best thing and its reception affect your friendship with Madonna? Friendships and failure in Hollywood are very difficult things to keep going. Yeah, it was definitely a strain.

Do you think you'll ever reconnect? Possibly. I don't know. Rupert, it's been a joy. Do you think you'll ever reconnect? Well, possibly. I don't know. Rupert, it's been a joy talking to you. I knew I'd love it. Oh, good. You have spoken about the sense of a journey and what the universe has thrown at you and the necessity of manure to fertilize the next creative endeavor. Do you think that you've been given a life lesson? What does it all mean? What's your lesson? Pete I think I was a very early kind of snowflake. I thought everything was coming for nothing, and I didn't really have to make much effort. And I think that was wrong. I think life is a struggle.

It's a huge struggle. And I think we should all accept that. And the struggle, And I think we should all accept that. And the struggle and how you manage the struggle is the excitement of life. And I don't think it ever stops being a struggle. It's like being a blade of grass growing up in a concrete block. You think, how does it happen? It's hard.

I think in the creative world, that struggle is absolutely essential. Otherwise, you never get anywhere. You never discover who you really are. Struggle is essential. Rupert, you're going to stay and you're going to proffer more advice like that on failing with friends.

But for now, thank you so, so much for coming on How to Fail. Thank you very much. I would love it if you followed this podcast, just hit the plus sign, to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends, your loved ones, your family members, your pets. I'd love to get more pets listening to How to Fail. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast.

Thank you so much for listening.