How many times do we have to read that Rupert Everett blames his lackluster career on coming out as gay, when all evidence is that it’s because he’s a jerk?

As Neil Patrick Harris’s openly-gay star only seems to be on the rise to eclipse his Doogie Howser fame; as Cheyenne Jackson joins the cast of 30 Rock; as Ellen DeGeneres becomes a Cover Girl; and as Rosie O’Donnell shows no sign of gay celebrity fatigue, it seems lost on Rupert Everett that people don’t particularly care for him and the reasons have little to do with his sexuality.

Never mind that he upset a lot of people by writing a tell-all Hollywood book that was unflattering to those who considered him a friend.  Never mind that his plastic surgery foray was another example of botched movie star vanity.  And never mind that Everett never seems to get his story right.

For instance, after he tossed off his friend Madonna in the aforementioned gossip book, she wanted nothing to do with him.  What if your friend wrote these things about you:

His observation that she smells “vaguely of sweat”, to take one example. Or that, like all Hollywood’s alpha females, she’s something of a “she-man”. Or just possibly it was this bit that she didn’t care much for: “Just like America, everything about Madonna had changed. And what had happened had been carefully wrapped in psychological clingfilm and locked inside an interior fridge. Sometimes, in moments of stress, Madonna had power cuts and the old whiny barmaid came screaming out of the defrosting cold room.”

He wrote about how Guy Ritchie doesn’t like gays (not true), and that Madonna ditched her gay brother and gay friends to be with him.  He wrote about her celebrity spats.

And Rupert was shocked that she was upset.

Yet in February 2009, he told the New York Times magazine that he and Madonna were friends again.  Then just days ago he contradicts himself with The Guardian:

So has she forgiven you for that now?

“No.”

Really?

“Elephants don’t forget.”

Has she not forgiven you in a jokey way, or has she really not forgiven you?

“She doesn’t trust me any more.”

Oh dear! Although she’s probably not the only one. Everett’s memoir is entirely unlike the usual Hollywood memoir: he tells stories that aren’t always entirely flattering, about himself, about other people, about the way the star system works, which is fabulous for the reader, but perhaps less so for his subjects.

And Madonna read that and likely said, “There you go again, why don’t you just learn ‘no comment’ you twat?”  It’s not just his friendship with Madonna; Everett has stepped on pretty much everyone he has come in contact with:

Julia Roberts is “beautiful and tinged with madness”. When she gives him a lift on the Sony jet from Chicago, where they’re filming, to New York, he writes, “I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B.” Sharon Stone he describes as a goddess, but it’s only when he starts rehearsals that “I realised something that had hitherto escaped me. She was utterly unhinged.”

In July 2009, Everett was fired from plum Vanity Fair after he called his boss Graydon Carter–whom I adore–fat and weird:

Who does one have to fuck to get OFF that masthead? He’s such a weird character, that [Vanity Fair Editor in Chief] Graydon [Carter]. He’s certainly not the buffoon he looks like. This is the most amazing thing I found out about him. I was once staying at a hotel and I was in the room directly under his. He is an amazing fuck. And you can quote me on this. The screams coming from the woman were some of the purest sounds of pleasure I’d ever heard. And there I was sitting alone in my room unfucked. Suddenly it all made sense. That messy hair of his that I always thought was buffoon hair was buffoon hair hiding a monster cock. The next day I went down to breakfast and Graydon came in and I thought to myself, well, now I understand why you are always acting so entitled and walking on air even though you’re rather fat. It’s because grazing the grass between your legs is this appendage of yours. I did rather politely tell him that morning that I thought he was a very good fuck.

So, Rupert, that is how you get the F-off the Vanity Fair masthead, and his friends said he needed the money.

Through all of this,  Rupert seems blissfully unaware that the problem is that he is an asshole and if you work with him, he’s going to slam and spill the beans about you.

In 1998, Everett was cited as an example of how being gay doesn’t prevent your star from rising.  After that was written, he starred in An Ideal Husband (for which he garnered multiple award nominations); Inspector Gadget; The Next Best Thing; Shreks II and III; The Chronicles of Narnia; and the St. Trinian´s films.

But if you ask Everett, he’ll tell you he’s being held back because he’s gay.:

“The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business,” Everett, 50, says. “It just doesn’t work and you’re going to hit a brick wall at some point. You’re going to manage to make it roll for a certain amount of time, but at the first sign of failure they’ll cut you right off.  Honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out”

In April 2009 he told the Daily Beast pretty much the opposite thing:

But the reason my career is so up and down is that I get very little opportunity. There is just very little opportunity for a fag. That’s the reality. There isn’t. But I have no regrets for being out. None. It’s not like I’m missing out on that much.

Actually, it’s a surprise Everett made it as far as he did; after all, his ‘story’ is hardly the stuff leading men are made of:

Rupert did not last even two years at London’s Central School for Speech and Drama in his mid teens, being expelled for “insubordination” (an early sign of his fiery, independent spirit). As soon as he moved to London he began exploring his sexuality. At seventeen he joined the flamboyantly campy and avant garde Glasgow Citizens’ Company. Over the next few years (in the late 70s and early 80s) he worked in theater and modelling.

It was during this period that the boy born with the silver spoon started working as a prostitute, or “rent boy.”

What about developing a gay fan base?  Everett is a fail there, too.  Gays who want the same rights as everyone else are pathetic just because he wants to live a life “outside the mainstream” as he says:

“I mean, if you are meant to have babies then great. But this whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian and then it gets cut out is just really weird….  It has to change. These awful middle-class queens – which is what the gay movement has become – are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still…”

So because Everett wants to be a freak, all gay people should want that, too.  In the same article, he insults the entire London theatre-going audience, which is essentially his own:

In London, the audience is like a bunch of old sluts who have had too much sex and can never cum. They’re mean and they dare you to entertain them.

Rupert, the problem is you have been so taken with your fame, and your fame-chasing; you are so taken with your rise that you’ve forgotten an element to being a successful actor is an air of mystery.  If you want to be a leading man, it’s one thing for you to be gay, but it’s another thing for you to continually talk about all the celebrities you are around, spilling their secrets and your private thoughts, telling the world about your prostitute days, tossing off your audience and gays who want families, and then expect men and women in an audience to suspend reality for two hours and picture you as the perfect leading man that they might like to see more of.

It doesn’t work that way.  Just don’t blame your crap career on anything other than your flawless ability to demonstrate to everyone that you’re a jerk who few people want to watch or get to know, Rupert.

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