NoWONDER

RUPERT EVERETT reveals what's behind his new collection of short stories, a meditation on rejection

Vanities /Books

ARMED WITH A rapier wit, Rupert Everett is one of those rare actors who holds writing as an equivalent competency, counting Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene among his primary literary inspirations. In February, Everett returns with a brand-new book, The American No, a collection of eight short stories about rejection that breathe new life into a handful of failed star-vehicle pitches that lived on in his head.

"I started writing in a moment of career doldrums so that's how I got to do it, because I only really learned how to write when I was about 15. It's just so lovely and lucky to have two arrows to one's bow," he tells Vanity Fair. "Writing doesn't come very easily to me. It's lonely and anxious because you look at the page, read a paragraph of drivel, and you're on your own with no one to help you make it better. Rehearsing a play with a group of actors is magical because all you have when you go into rehearsal is your own life as collateral. It feels sacred in the world we're in now, which is so virtual with everybody working from home, and everybody hiding behind social media, nobody speaking, nobody talking." Having surfed the ebbs and flows of showbiz for nearly five decades, in The American No Everett embraces how, for both actors and writers, getting rebuffed is part of the job. "You have to develop a strong hide," he says.

After making his literary debut with Hello Darling, Are You Working?, a humorous novel that Kirkus Reviews described as "Candide in modern drag" when it was published in 1992, Everett learned that "the more you read, the better the writer you are. It's the same thing for an actor. The more movies you see, the better an actor you are," he says. In the years that followed, Everett released another amusing tale with The Hairdressers of St. Tropez (1995) before focusing on his own story in the form of three memoirs: Red Carpetsand Other Banana Skins (2006), Vanished Years (2012), and To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde (2020).

Despite a successful career, Everett notes that he is not exempt from moments of selfdoubt or anxiety and offers one way to cope. "You have to die to the past all the time, I think that's the knack. Just not holding on to who you were last week is the easiest way through it."

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL