Rupert Everett in Maratea: "I was kicked out of Emily in Paris, but now I'm working on a new film."

Shakespeare, Italy, Oscar Wilde: these are the great passions of Rupert Everett, the English actor who, since his days in Another Country and Dancing with a Stranger, through Rosi and Montaldo, and now Giulio Base, who cast him as Caiaphas in the film The Gospel of Judas, which screened out of competition at the Locarno Film Festival, has had a special relationship with Italy. "I wanted to be Julie Andrews," he says in an interview that goes back to his roots. "Mary Poppins was my favorite film, the one that made the difference for me." Everett tries to overcome his disappointment, an award-winning guest at Marateale: "I was ousted by Emily in Paris and I still don't know why." The actor played Giorgio Barbieri, the director of an interior design firm, in the episode "All Roads Lead to Rome."

“I shot a scene in the last season and they said, ‘We'll talk next year.’ I waited for them to call me, but in the end, the call never came and they simply fired me. It was a tragedy for me. I was in bed for two weeks because I couldn't get over it,” he explains. “It's always very difficult to understand the dynamics of show business. When they write the script, they think they love you, but then things change and they decide to kill off your character and you don't know why. Yet I have a lot of experience behind me.” Coming out in the early '90s caused a stir. Do you have any regrets? “It caused a stir, yes, and it brought prejudice. It wasn't easy to advance in my career; being openly gay in a hypocritical environment, as was even more the case in those years, put me off many jobs. I was living in Paris, I was writing a novel, Hello, Darling, Are You Working?, and I didn't want to hide it; I wanted to live being myself.” Everett describes himself as a workaholic: theater, television, cinema, writing. "When I was young, I wasn't like that; I was lazy. My advice is that a young actor must always work. A career is an up-and-down process, and you always have to make an effort to be there. I make more effort now than before, but I was wrong."

Delighted by Italy's love for him—films like Giuliano Montaldo's The Gold-Etched Glasses and Francesco Rosi's Chronicle of a Death Foretold boosted his popularity in the 1980s—Everett, who speaks Italian, said he was "honored" to have inspired Tiziano Sclavi to create the Dylan Dog look that later led him to play Dellamorte Dellamore, Michele Soavi's film, which celebrated its 30th anniversary and is a cult classic for comic book fans. "I was happy to discover that the Dylan Dog character was partly inspired by me, as Sclavi confessed to me," he recalls. When it comes to choosing a new project, "I've always been guided by the fact that it has a historical setting. I'm crazy about that. What I enjoy most, whether it's theater, film, or television—he was also a well-regarded Sherlock Holmes, editor's note—is discovering the historical truth behind a character, the context, the era." Then there's Oscar Wilde, a British author persecuted for his homosexuality in England in the second half of the 19th century, who for Rupert Everett is an almost Christ-like figure, a cult figure. "I've dedicated a lot to him. In 2018's The Happy Prince, I wrote, directed, and starred in the story of his final years in exile in Paris. My dream, which I'm always working on, is to make another film about him."