Mad, Sad and Bad with Paloma Faith - Rupert Everett: I Treated People Badly Because I Felt Insecure

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

Rupert Everett has had an expansive career, from Prince Charming in Shrek, to Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince; more recently the fabulous Giorgio in Emily in Paris, and less recently, my old Headmistress at St Trinian’s.In this conversation, Rupert reminisces about his early years, from his melancholic birth, to his magical experiences of the gay London party scene in the 1970s. Rupert also shares how his experience of growing up in a Catholic school ignited a naughty streak which now sees him questioning some of his behaviour as a younger man.Rupert has been a dear friend of mine for many years so it was a real pleasure to have him over - as expected with him, there are no holds barred - we chatted about religion, sexuality, narcissism, national identity and everything in between - plus plenty of cackling laughter too!#RUPERTEVERETT #PALOMAFAITH #MADSADBAD—Find us on: Instagram / TikTok / YouTube—Credits:Producer: Jemima RathboneAssistant Producer: Magda CassidyEdit Producer: Pippa BrownEditor: Shane O'ByrneVideo: Jake Ji & Grisha NikolskyVideo Editor: Josh BennettOriginal music: BUTCH PIXYSocial Media: Laura CoughlanMarketing: Eleanore BamberExec Producer: Jemima RathboneExec Producers for Idle Industries: Dave Granger & Will MacdonaldSenior Exec Producer: Holly Newson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Paloma Faith and this is my show. Each week I welcome someone fantastic into my home to talk about what makes them mad, sad and bad. Roll recording! Hello? Anyone there? Goodness me, the patient! Miss Fritton! You haven't changed! Paloma, God, you've done all right, am you?

Remember when you came to my old flat? Yes. It was just nothing but a purple box. I know. And a log fire. This is beautiful. I've seen this in the magazine already. Have you? Which one?

I don't know. One of your pieces of publicity. To you, he's Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince, George in my best friend's wedding, or more recently, the fabulous Giorgio, in Emily in Paris. He's voiced Prince Charming in the Shrette franchise, and his breakout role was in 1984 in another country. He's an acclaimed author and national treasurer.

He's outrageous, outspoken and was out before it was cool and when it was quite difficult to be out. But to me, he was my headmistress in St Trinians. He bought me a dinner when I had no money and promised that he would let me buy him dinner when I could afford it. I still haven't bought him dinner yet. Will you let me take you for dinner? Yes. It's Rupert Everett. Tell me, Rupert.

What do you think you're most well known for And actually what would you like to be most well known for? Well, I suppose I must be most well known for being an actor. I mean, generally. And I would like to be, if I was kind of going to be dead tomorrow, I would like to be well known for, well, being an actor, but also being, I would love to be a kind of Samuel Peep's type person that in 400 years when everyone's living on the crowd,

or something like that, they can find a book that I've written about something, and it'll be one of those books that you can think, oh, that's what happened then. That's how that was. Like a doorway into this age. Yeah, kind of a chronicler of our times, which I find mad, bad and sad. Love how you did that. So that leads us nicely into. Can you tell me a time that you've been mad?

Mad means insane. So I'm not angry. for me. Insane, I think I feel my whole past to me, looking at it now from the standpoint of a 65-year-old, feels mad. I can't quite understand what made me do things. And looking at these things kind of objectively or subjectively from now, they seem, a lot of things I did seem quite mad. One of the most weird things was my relationship with the punter. It was completely off-center. when I was young, I felt working in the theatre that they didn't really deserve me, I suppose. I don't know what I was thinking, because I behaved so badly on stage in plays all the

time, just like I was as a school child, but as a school child, I can understand why I did it. I was a very shy boy that I went to school, and I became completely different and became a show-off, and that was my way through. And I would always have, like, bits of fishing wire, attached to books and have them move across the table so all the boys would be and then the teacher wouldn't see and then he'd see and then get furious and be chucked out and somehow I didn't get over that for when I got into a serious career in the theatre for example and I was always playing practical jokes and things that were funny but they brought shows to a standstill and what left the rest of the cast also a bit on the back foot

because all I wanted to do was to make you know my friends in the laugh, but at the cost of the audience and the play and my raison d'etre, which was to be an actor, it was very peculiar. And looking at that, I find it's quite mad. I think I was quite mad. Do you think that's self-sabotaging or more wild than mad? I don't think it's even as thought out as self-sabotage, because I never quite believe in any of those psychobabble things of self-destruction. I think it was two things. First of all, becoming successful is quite a heady wine to drink.

And then also it was right at the beginning of AIDS. And you didn't really know at the beginning of AIDS if you had it. You couldn't tell until about, I think, 1988. So everyone who felt they might have been around it was rather like a cartoon character that had gone off the edge of a cliff and was a little bit before dropping. Am I next? Am I next? And I think being in front of the...

camera was a very peculiar thing because I would wake up and have dreams at night of people going, what's that on your face, Rupert? And then the whole thing coming out in the open as you were filming a take or something. But still, it doesn't really make me understand what it was in me that didn't respect. And maybe this is being more conservative, like you said, as you get older. Because now, you know, I realize, I do respect the punter who pays 60 quid, 80 quid, 100 quid to come see me in a play, I wouldn't dream of not trying to do my absolute 100% best. I would never go out now on a bender, on a work night, for example. But then it just was, I suppose I had a kind of upper class. I lived on the King's Road during the punk period, and the working classes were punks on the

street, and the upper classes were junkies in the kind of neighboring mansions. And I think I caught a kind of weird version of punkishness. which I never really managed to shake off until it was too late because I really damaged my relationship with the business. Do you think youth gives you a complacency that may be the closer, the more you recognise your mortality, the less complacent you become or something? Yeah, I think when you're young,

you always think it's open-ended anyway, so you can turn it all around next week. Or you could change at the drop of a hat. And then suddenly you're 60. Because it happens. And then you're like, oh, actually, really need these punters and I really respect the fact they're still coming to watch me. Yes, completely. And feeling ashamed at all the awful things. I used to do awful things to the

punters as well. Like? Well, I remember one couple wrote me a letter saying they couldn't hear my performance and I was so, well, I was stoned, apart from anything else. And I wrote a letter saying so sorry to hear about your problem with the audibility of my performance. Please accept my heartfelt apologies and I turned over the page and I cut off a wedge of my pew. and I sellotape them to the other side and said, and these few pubic hairs in the hope of it. And I just don't know. I mean, it was quite funny.

But it is mad and it's so wonderful, though. No, but I should have worked on my audibility. And people would say sometimes because I was getting, and the other thing, I had kind of pretensions to be, I don't know, Sean Penn or something on stage, so I was going to talk in really quietly like this in the play. and people would say, speak up from the back of the stores and things like that.

And I would almost go, up yours. I had the opposite. I used to do singing in like dinner and dance rooms. And then people would be eating dinner and come up to the stage and say, excuse me, do you mind just keeping it down? Because we can't talk and eat at the same time.

And I'd be like, fuck off. And then I'd stand on their table. No, but at least you were giving it your all. You were giving it your all. That's what you... I wasn't giving it. I was fucking with them. But it's a different manifestation of the same rage, I think.

I guess. Because I would stand on the table and kick their food and step in it and stuff like that and be like, yeah, now, I'm in the control. Yeah, but I would have liked to see that. I wouldn't like to have seen my... A mumbling. Me mumbling on stage to an 800-seat theater. And then when someone dared say,

speak up from the back, getting even quieter. No, I don't understand that. I don't understand what was the kind of connections in my brain that made it feel all right. That's the thing. So that's my madness, I think. Is madness of freedom? No, not really. I think it becomes another prison, really.

Everything is likely to turn into a prison. And the prison for me was that that madness lived with me. for years and years and years afterwards. And especially in a world like British show business, which it was at that point. I don't know. I don't really know what it's like now, but it was very militaristic in the 70s, 80s.

It was kind of lefty, lovey, but very organized. And everyone knew their position in the hierarchy. And so it took me years to kind of get over that reputation, that kind of that madness. And I regret that in a way. I also regret. Very damaging. And I also regret, because I am quite good in the theatre,

I also regret not trying harder and doing more and thinking. Well, we're not talking about regrets, but madness. I find that was a mad period. I think my 20s were very, very mad period. Is it mad not to conform social expectations? Like if someone would say, for example, to you, you know, would you like to go to dinner with us and you say, actually, no, I don't really feel like it. And be like, she's so mad.

Like, I don't, I think I'm just saying how I feel. Like a child would. Yeah, being honest. Maybe it's childlike. Well, you're not making it easier for people because the easier way of saying, I don't want, I, I'd love to, but I'm, you know, meeting. I've heard you say that to me before. What, I'd love to be, I'm meeting to become in. I'd love to you, but I'm just actually otherwise engaged.

No, I haven't ever said that to you're lying. Have you ever felt that you've been saying one second and then like a moment later or a while later you've lost your grip on that? With anger more than madness. I think anger is a thing that makes you lose your grip and that can happen in a second on a perfectly nice walk

some thought can come into your head or my head of slights mostly. I've got a list of slights as long. as an elephant's dick, you know, that I can kind of access. But that's not really madness, I wouldn't say. That was just, that's just too much baggage of anger. And do you find it hard to let things go then? No, most of the time I find it fine to let things go, but then you never know things happen. If you're talking about one, from one moment to another, the weirdest things, I think the biggest change is for me from one moment to another is suddenly being in a perfectly good

mood and then accessing something that made me angry and then suddenly everything turns into unravels and you start snapping everyone then something happens and that creates something then you're in a really bad kind of cartoon under a cartoon thundercloud. I like, that's reassuring to me to hear you say that because when that happens, I'm always questioning, is it me that's the mad, like made this happen, this mad anger or is it the other person because I'm always worried like, am I the narcissist or are they the narcissist? Well, both of you are probably. Everyone's a narcissist these days.

Yeah, I mean, it's very common. That's very normal. That's normal. It's great to be a narcissist. As the child of a narcissist, I was worried it was hereditary and I'm convinced it is. I'm sure it is actually. I'm sure it is because you copied lots of things from your parents. So coming from what you've, when you talk about your childhood, you talk about

being raised in a conservative, quite religious home. Do you think that some madness is healthy? Did you find that, like, when you grew up, were you taught to suppress feelings that maybe later in life you've explored, like, that maybe in a healthy way? I think feelings weren't, you know, feelings have come into vogue in the last century, from zero to 100, really.

There weren't feelings in the same way before Jung and Freud. People didn't think it was their right or they didn't think the next thing to do is to see how I feel. Just didn't, that's how you got people in armies to walk into battle and just be shot down because they didn't really have the same feelings. Or access to them? Not access to them.

It's just they didn't, things were much more, animal, they took pain so much easier, for example. Imagine now someone getting their leg cut off with just a bit of whiskey. They'd die, actually. They'd have a heart attack and die, but somehow then people didn't. And I think... Some of them did. Some of them did. But feelings have become the kind of feelings and relationships have changed so much since the 20th century and since cinema and our expectations of ourselves and what we should be feeling and having feelings. And feelings and emotions. We ask each other though, don't we?

Yeah, endlessly now. Yeah. And I now think they're slightly overrated. Do you want to go back? The people I admire most now, in a way, are very, very old people. I was staying in a hotel doing a film in Wales

a couple of months ago. And there were all these tour buses full of kind of OAP Yorkshire people. Really amazing and really tough. All of them kind of falling to pieces because they were 85 and 80, but really, really nice. And I thought, God,

and they're kind of pre-feeling in the sense. Do you not think that that's because what's really, what my observation of that, the culture of that, the Norfolk and stuff, where I've lived there for a bit, is that you don't need to be so in touch of your feelings because there's so much community. Possibly.

So, like, you have your neighbour come in and say, you know, can I borrow some... Yeah, possibly. I'm just going to pop in, like, my best friends from Liverpool. No, I think that's a really good point. She pops in, her mum pops into everyone on the street just to check if they're all right, check if they need anything. And that's quite a reassuring present. I think that's a good thing.

But also, like, an appreciation of just the presence of a person rather than a person asking them loads of questions. Like, you know, well, you can imagine like someone's voice in your head saying, well, what, you know, what's great? I ask my mum sometimes, what about her relationship? And she's like, well, he's still around. Well, I think that's true. It's like lower your expectations, just a present.

Or not even lower them. Maybe that it goes up because I think the best way of attacking a relationship is imagining your two dogs in a basket because I have two dogs. and they're so interesting to watch. They really are together, but they don't communicate, and they don't have feelings because sometimes one

tries to play with the other one, and the other one says, fuck off. But the one who's been rejected doesn't go into the whole numbers that we go. Oh, my God, what does he think of me? Oh, I don't know.

Something's gone wrong here, and I've got to go and ask somebody else about it. Woof, woof, woo! They just get on with it. And I think a little lick at night on the bum and then, you know, it keeps the doctor away. I'd love a bum lick every right. That's it. That's enough.

That's rimming, people. A time you've been sad, Rupert. Okay, sadness is a very difficult one for me. Why? Because I don't know. I was trying to think about things that I feel very sad about. And mostly, it's in art or books or films that I can access sad. Or melancholy.

Oh, melancholy. Oh, I came out of the womb melancholic, I think. That's why I thought I was surprised when you said sad, because I think they're definitely related. But melancholy is rather like acting up on stage. It's just another kind of weird type of mechanism to stop you looking at reality, I think. I don't feel melancholic now anymore.

I think my melancholy was a cover-up. Well, actually, it's a softener of anger in a way. You feel quite angry about everything because you always want more. There's a safety in melancholy, isn't there? And it's quite fun being melancholy. It's rather than having flu. Oh! Which is really lovely.

It's that. Yeah. And it's provided... What's the point of anything? Yeah, and you can sit there in a cafe feeling miserable about life and, what's going to happen next? I don't know. Yeah.

What's the point? We're all nothing. We're just matter. We're on the edge. Yeah, exactly. That's really fun. So that's, I think that kind of thing is just...

It's quite creative. Yeah, it can be creative. But that's not sadness anyway, I don't think. But when have you been sad? I'm sad. Well, you know, I think when people die, you get sad. Or if people, if you know people who are having a really difficult time, I think, you know, particularly,

with, I'm thinking when we were younger, when I was younger, you know, when people started dying of AIDS, for example, that was sad, or it would have been sad if it wasn't so terrifying. But I think mostly sad for me is, I mean, there's this poet called Tom Gunn, and I did these series of evenings at the Wilton's Music Hall

reading his poems about someone going into hospital. and I couldn't get through one of them for just kind of my voice they made me very, very sad. Do you think that your experience of death makes you sad about your own mortality? No, I'm longing to die. I would love to leave here and be shot in the back of the head.

Really? Yeah. Or is that you just being as henry? No, I think I would. The finality and suddenness of it would be nicer than a long, drawn-out suffering. long drawn, running for the bus for an audition at the National Theatre. Forget it. If you got a bullet for me, do it now. You don't feel comfortable with sadness, though.

I do feel comfortable with sadness, but I don't find it, no, I do feel, I feel very sad when I hear, like, I've got to the age where lots of friends, you know, getting things. So I feel sad when everyone else has problems and you don't know what to do and to help them. And I feel sad about, Yeah, no, I do feel sad, but what I really feel sad about is when I access real, kind of what we think of, a sadness, is kind of watching a film or arts is really what makes me emotional, I suppose. Do you think that's because it gives you words or a way of communicating a feeling that's, like, very difficult to access unless that helps you? Well, every sad event in your life, you're living through, so you're moving through it, and there's a challenge, after challenge after challenge.

So you don't really have time to stand back from it and say, oh, this is really sad. Or this is, it's like funny. It's all kind of you're driving through life. And then looking back on it, ladies, you said, God, that was really sad. But actually, it's normally looking back on things. It makes you feel sad rather than, you know,

if you go and see someone who's in hospital, you're not feeling sad at the time. You're probably trying to be fun, the person in hospital. then in retrospect you feel sad. So in that sense, I think art has the kind of winning hand in sadness because you watch a film, you know, where the heroine leaves on a train and the guy gets run over by a taxi or whatever it is, and then you feel sad watching it from the outside.

Inside life, I think, as an emotion, it's something that you see in the past, mostly rather than apart from melancholy and horror or fear. Yeah. I feel it most in art, in poems and books and films and plays sometimes. And music. I'd love to speak to you about your sadness you mentioned about how England has been forgotten. Oh, I think I feel sad about, I suppose this is a thing that happens with age too. And this is what you were saying also, but you do end up, or at least I've ended up becoming more

conservative as I've got older because I look back on the time, for example, this town when I first came to it in the 1970s, which was a very kind of rough and tumble. And sexuality that no one really thought of in the same way. And being gay, for example, in the old days, in the 70s was quite a magical thing, considering it was only just legalized. But if you went to any of the places, I used to, I love being a leather queen right from an early age and there was this bar in Earl's Court called the Colhorn. And in it, it was ageless, classless and raceless, weirdly enough. Because the gazing was so small, anybody who had the faintest

proclivity went to, there was only a few places to go. So you could find, you know, a Duke chatting with a plumber who was then going to go off and beat him up, you know, very satisfactory. Consensually. Consensually. and you found, and you counted also just for being daring to go in there because it was still, you still kind of felt afraid, especially if you were young, that people would see you going in. And so I missed that in a way. I miss the eccentricity of the post-war kind of blitz mentality

and the tough way that everyone had to live before, before there was heating in every single room. Most people lived when I was a kid with one warm room and everything else was just icicles. That's the Englishness you're sad about losing. It's not being cold for the sake of being cold. It's just it produced a rather robust, rough and ready type. Tell me a time you've been bad.

What does bad mean? Well, that's up to you. You're a religious man. Or you were. I don't know about being bad. I mean, in religious sense, I guess it's bad means going against morality. Whose morality? Well, there are certain...

I answer this interestingly, because I've had an opposite experience to you. I was raised by a vehemently atheist person who was so atheist that that was almost a religion to the point where just for example, like, you know, I'd be like, well, when I'm older, I want to go to heaven and my mom would just be like, it doesn't exist. Yeah, you just go into the soil and that's it.

And you might, if you're lucky, help other things to grow out of that soil. And why isn't that enough for you? Why is your ego so big that you want to be better than just helping a plant grow? You know, so that's how I was raised. And so I also raised as an atheist have a strong sense of my morality because I guess what bad means to me is the things that I might do that make me feel like bad or make me feel that I've affected another person negatively.

And that might be my... definition of bad because of that rather than being told the ten commandments. Like people say, for example, well, you know, Ten Commandments are great to guide us. And I say, well, I know that I don't want to murder someone because I'd feel awful about it. Or I know that I don't want to sleep with someone else's wife or husband because I just would damage their lives and why would I want that responsibility? So that's my personal idea of badness. But I guess bad comes in many forms.

Yeah, I don't know. I agree about all those things. And I suppose in a way, the things that I can think of most, you know, words and actions can be cheap to you while you're doing them. And you can find reasons for doing things that are either bitchy or manipulative or destructive to other people. So have you done those, have you been those things? Yeah, I think at work sometimes I disliked. somebody. I wasn't, I was deliberately nasty. I think that's bad. Do you feel bad about that now or do you just forgive yourself? I don't see the point. It happened and it's gone. I mean, sometimes I was a very, you know, I am, was a very insecure person. So sometimes at work, I treated people, people got on my nerves a lot that just, there was no reason for them to get on my nerves. And, um, and, um, I think I was quite manipulative in those kind of situations.

And I had a sharp tongue that I didn't sometimes know the strength of to some people, those kind of things. And that is just as bad because the wave band of badness is the waveband above which the murderer suddenly, you know, knife someone. So you're all responsible, I think, for the person who murders. and for the war in a way. The wavelength of badness or evil or nastiness or negativity is what creates the big negative moments.

Like a football match. You're passing a ball. It passes on and there's something, someone goes too far in it. And if you had a kind of godlike camera to follow a kind of bad thought through, as it kind of passed through, ricocheted through a little group, onto another group and someone getting on the bus being really nasty to someone else and then someone else going home and then killing someone, you could probably... The consequences of your bit.

You could follow the cause and effect of everybody's action. And that's what they say in Buddhism. The cause and effect is so gigantic you can't even begin to... Because it basically starts off with two tetchy dinosaurs. And then, you know, and the cause and effect goes on and on and on and ends up in the war in Gaza. Do you feel remorse for bad things you've done? I don't see the point of remorse because that's rather like looking back at empire and just saying, ooh, how awful.

You should move forward rather than feel... And just not do it again? Feeling remorseful is just another luxurious wank, actually. You have to move forward and be rigorous with yourself. How do you move forward? Well, you just say, oh, that's what I did. and then the next time you start doing it again, you hope that you're not carried away by that, you know,

that side of yourself that you can't stop it, or you refine yourself. I like the term carried away. Do you feel like you can get easily carried away? Easily, like I said to you, about suddenly an angry thought coming into my head. It can change the whole tone of my day, as can a lovey, lovey thought.

Do you think, like, if... I mean, look, imagine the day when you're walking on air after a fabulous night and a wonderful shag and beautiful breakfast and a divine call from your agent and then you walk out of the house and everything does go very well normally. Yeah, because your mood has reflected on everything

and it shines back. But even that's a bad one because that's also, it's quite fragile that mood because then you can come home and then you can find another pair of girls' pants in the hands. Who's of those? For example. There's nothing in the fridge. And then it veers off into a little.

another way. So there has to be a way somehow of just seeing yourself, seeing what you're doing, and acting immediately. But remorse, I think, is very common. Do you feel like, so if you just move on, if somebody does something bad to you or you've been wronged, do you forgive easily, or do you accept apologies? I think if I was faced with someone, I'm easy to forgive. But what I could do, like I could wake up in the night and really never stop thinking about and feel furious and say, well, I'm going to say this next time I see him.

Then you never do. Because I'm too much of a coward, anyway. But I think less and less now. I think the great thing about getting old is it's one of the bad things. You become more bland in a way, but you don't have so much violent thoughts back and forth in different directions, good things and bad things.

I don't find you remotely bland, but maybe comparatively to what you were before. I'm not so kind of actively anything. Just me. M. Did you used to enjoy it when you were bad? Yes, I loved it. Even the like being manipulative. Yes, I loved it.

It was such fun. in it? Revelled in it. Do you think that like goes with the sort of cliche of like a mean queen? Mean queen, yeah. Yeah, total mean queen. You were like, this is my role, this is my character, like an Antoninato, like the theatre and it's double. I am now out, so now I'm a mean queen.

No, I just loved it. Why? Because I love being in a gang. So you ganged up on people? Yes, of course. And I love gossiping about people in a nasty way. Have you ever thought about how that might really desperately badly impact somebody? Yes, no, that's what I'm talking about.

Yeah. Yes, and it's just as bad as the person murdering in a way because that provides this wavelength. Because the victim may then become the murderer. Yeah, this is part of the wavelength that is going through, the planet of negativity. And that's what, so we all have, no, but yes, well, I didn't realize. Now I realize we all have a risk. It's no point saying, oh, I hate, I mean, I don't mean to say, but there's no point

saying I hate the war there or I feel terrible about the past. That's just, that's just wanking. All you've got to do. I love wanking, by the way. I do, wanking. Don't get me wrong. But all you have to do is stop it yourself, obviously. And if everyone did that, then, then the world would be greater.

But no one does. So it's like, yeah, if we take responsibility for our own individual contribution to the negativity. To here and now. Yeah, that's it. It does. That must be the truth. I quite, but then we'd miss your wicked queen. Yeah, but the wicked queen.

The wicked queen was probably made, was cruel. But yes, the wicked queen did. something. But was the Wicked Queen a victim before she became the perpetrator? No. Nobody's bullied you. Yes, but I wasn't really a victim. I was just a wicked queen. You're like, doesn't this evil just feel divine? Yeah, it just felt fun. You spoke a little bit when we spoke about the idea of bad being bad acting or giving a bad performance or a reviewer saying they didn't think you were great in something. Yeah.

Like, so first of all, did you agree with any of your bad reviews? Yes. And how does, and have you ever disagreed with any of your bad reviews? Like, so actually I thought I was brilliant. Well, I only, there's only few that, you, I only read the good ones. You know, as soon as they're bad, you know, you kind of ignore them. But once I was. Oh my God.

wish I was like that. I'm the opposite. I read all the bad ones and none of the good ones. I get everyone, I glean them from everybody else. So how was it that one? But one, when I was in a film with Madonna, someone said I was her pet rock. I had all the kind of all the liveliness of a pet rock. Did you agree? And I don't know that I agreed at the time. I was probably, well, it's outrageous. But yeah, totally. Growing up in a religious household, Catholic, my grandmother was Catholic. And what I thought was funny about that was when I was, actually, I'll tell you a little story. When I was about 21, I went out with my grandmother, who's Spanish, and she was vehemently Catholic. And she said, I need to tell you a couple of things.

When you meet a man you love, you're going to have sexual intercourse with him, but only because you love him. but only because you love him after you get married. And I was like, listening to her talk about this for a while, she was like, it's a beautiful thing, you will have the children together. Have you met someone you want? Have you met someone you like? And I was like, oh my God, like I. So many people.

How do I break it to her? And I just turned to her and I said, Grandma, I'm not a virgin. And she went and I was like, this pause and she went oh i'm so proud of you i'm like oh my goodness the catholicism was just immediately abandoned for the fact and celebrated made me feel amazing about the fact that in catholic eyes i was a war you should play a spanish person you're very good thank with alan very very very good so my experience of catholicism i guess was catholic light because what I thought was these huge guilty things.

She was just like quite blase about it really. In the end. In the end. But like you were raised in a Catholic house. So how is badness ingrained in you? Well, first of all, obviously when you're Catholic and especially back in the day, as soon as you started having any kind of gay action or interaction, which I had from the age of seven.

Centiful. Well, very, very young too, because I went to boarding. school when I was seven. And immediately, we used to go around each other's beds rubbing bottoms and things like that. And then we'd have to go to confession. And without even being told about it, that's what's so weird. I knew it was wrong. That is weird. Yeah, it's so weird. And I even had a dream, I mean, I don't know if this is very good, about sperm before I even knew what it was. That's interesting. It's so weird. So then I had to go to confession. We went to confession every Sunday. And I used to wrestle with what word I would use in the confessional to

explain this. And you could just see the priest's face through the grill. And he'd be wearing something he wouldn't tell me by my son, what is your sins? And I'd say, I've been vulgar. And I saw him on the other side of him, like, you know, because he obviously thought I'd said something, you know, rude. And so I thought, oh, he doesn't understand. But I got away with it. I've done the confession. So then they went back, rushed back and rubbed more bottoms. He didn't know the details. No, because the great thing about forgiveness in the Catholic Church is you're new. The slate is wiped clean after every confession.

You can start off again. Would you just tell me finally, what makes you glad? Being here today with you, Paloma. I think it's very nice. I think, no, I do think knowing people for a long time is quite fun. Yeah. And glad me. get from that? Well, you get a feeling of, I think we both made it through to here today,

you know, which we might not have done. Are you and I? Yeah. Oh, that's nice. Do you think? Yeah, I feel like... I'm here in your amazing house with your Chinese wallpaper on your leopard print, you know, fabulous thing. That's from my own collection. That's from my own collection. And I'm here, you know, with my mobs. And we're still here. And we've known each other for now. I think it's been 20 years probably. That's a long time. I think that's quite exciting.

So I think that's gladdening and it's life affirming. And we're communicating. I think that's good. Thank you though, because I feel like grateful. You came to my book launch and it lit up the whole place. In my stupid coat. No, it was lovely that coat. Everyone loved you.

I thought like Sesame Street character. Yellow tights and webbed. feet. No, it was wonderful. Yeah, so I think that for me is, you know, is really as good as things can be, really. To know that people, we're still here and still talking. Still here and talking and communicating.

And you're doing your podcast and I'm ruining it. You're just ending my whole career. I'm joking. But thank you. Thank you. It's really wonderful to still know you. Yeah, it's wonderful to still know you. Thank you, Rupert.

and dastardly abhorrent. Oh, that was exhausting. God. I think... I've learned absolutely nothing as usual. Yeah, me too. I see you, bitch. In June, I see you.

Okay, I'll see you later. Thank you so much, Paloma. Thank you. What are we having the dinner? Your one dinner. Yeah, I'll invite you for dinner. Okay, where are we going? Nando's.

Bye. Bye. Wasn't that great? All of the links of everything we mentioned in the show can be found in the episode description. in the episode description. Oh, and while you're there, why not subscribe and follow the show too?

See you all next time. Potatoes, potatoes.