In a New York Times magazine profile in which he's followed house-hunting in New York City, Rupert Everett says that being gay was a major impediment to his career in the movies:
"I wanted to be a movie star…You can't say about work that I
didn't try very hard. That really wasn't true. I've always been a great
opportunist, but the opportunity was not always there. I had a
difficult set of circumstances to deal with, particularly for a movie
career…Being gay, really. It just doesn't work…I was out before. I was never really in, I don't think. Everybody
sabotages their careers to a certain extent, not consciously, but I
don't think I have more than anyone else. People get distorted ideas of
themselves; being in this business, you can't fail to. Suddenly you
think you should be playing the Marlon Brando
role in ‘On the Waterfront' when you should really be playing a Noël
Coward role…I think
success in show business is a very heady wine when you're a kid,
particularly if it happens small, because you're always trying to make
it grow. There's no happy moment in it, because you're just grasping
and elbowing, elbowing, elbowing your way to the next stop. And you
make lots of wrong decisions because of it.
Everett also says that studios' casting decisions are influenced by their presumption of the audience's homophobia: "The paranoid moneymakers know that when the star goes to the first
night with his wife, the public sees that. They'll accept
someone playing gay because they know he's really straight."
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