‘Being famous has become rather common’

Rupert Everett tells Tim Walker that there is nothing wrong with being a bimbo, that political correctness has been ‘a disaster for everyone’ and that gay adoption is wrong

Rupert Everett has just done Richard & Judy, or maybe, he concedes, Richard and Judy have just done him. ‘It is hard to work out who is using who on these occasions,’ he says. ‘I suppose ultimately we are all just hustlers.’ The actor is proud of his autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and, now that it has come out in paperback, he is throwing himself at the promotional tour with professional gusto. He can’t, however, disguise the fact that the chat show circuit now seems to him a trifle infra dig.

‘I think being famous has become rather common, actually. I don’t really respect the sort of people who get to be famous these days. That whole world doesn’t seem at all glamorous any more — the films aren’t glamorous, the music isn’t and the people you see getting out of the private jets aren’t. I think there is something rather tragic about it, actually.’

The man who acted Julia Roberts off the screen in My Best Friend’s Wedding and who now does the voice of Prince Charming in the Shrek films is nudging 50. He is sitting opposite me in his favourite Italian restaurant, just around the corner from his flat in Soho. He has some grey hairs and the odd wrinkle, but it is the peculiarly preppy, self-conscious way that he smiles and laughs that means he remains spookily like the adolescent that he played in the film Another Country.

He has a tendency to give more of his time to photographers than to interviewers but that, he says, is simply a matter of being practical. ‘The sort of people who read magazines that have loads of pictures in them never read the accompanying words.