Actor Rupert Everett has appeared in a number of hit movies, including the Julia Roberts romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, the Oscar Wilde adaptation An Ideal Husband and the cult-favorite horror comic adaptation Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore). However, he’s managed to reach his widest audience as the voice of Prince Charming in all three of DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek films. And that’s all fine and dandy for the self-professed animation fan.
‘I love animation,’ Everett tells us. ‘I love animated films. I think they shed more light on society than live action does, to be honest. I think Shrek, The Simpsons and South Park tell you much more about the world than Maid in Manhattan or Mission Impossible. Live-action doesn’t seem to tell you anything real because it’s all wannabe characters and fantasy relationships.’
Everett goes on assert that politically correctness has thrown a roadblock in front of most live-action films, preventing them from reflecting reality. ‘Political correctness means you can only smoke a cigarette if you’re a villain, right? I’m not pro- or against smoking, but you could be a saint and smoke, but you can’t be in a movie. That’s just one example, but political correctness means that nothing can happen that doesn’t have a moral outcome. It’s totally uncreative. For some reason, particularly in this country, animation is so much more edgy than anything else. You wouldn’t be able to have someone fart in a bath in a live-action movie, it just wouldn’t happen. We have very far-out comedies as well in live action but they go even further, something like There’s Something About Mary‘ but they don’t have the same profundity as [Shrek] because this does tell you about our culture. It’s social commentary whereas that is just fantasy. I don’t think live-action, as it did in the old days, really holds a mirror up to society very much anymore.’
During the production of Shrek the Third, Everett recorded his lines from studios in Hong Kong, Berlin, London, New York, Los Angeles. The ability to perform anywhere he happens to be is one reason he feels working on an animated movie is ‘the best job to have.’ He also says he’s learned a lot about his craft through the process.
‘It’s a lot of fun working on cartoons,’ Everett notes. ‘You have to enlarge everything you’re saying slightly. It’s a very good lesson for acting, actually, because when you look at a cartoon character acting a scene, everything is a little bit larger than if you were acting in a live-action movie. It’s fascinating because they don’t miss out on any emotional beat of a sentence. Cartoons can teach you a lot about acting.’
Less enjoyable, according to Everett, was his green-screen work on Paramount Pictures’ upcoming fantasy feature Stardust, a Matthew Vaughn film starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, Peter O’ Toole, Ian McKellen and Ricky Gervais, among others.
‘I’ve never been so bored in my life,’ he remarks. ‘Standing in front of a green screen in a studio’some people do it for months but I only did it for a few weeks’does really get you down. The worst thing about it is it takes forever because you’re doing the green screen but the scene has been shot years ago, so there’s all these little dots where this bit happens and that bit happens and you’re so bored you can’t concentrate on what you’re supposed to be looking at. Then you get everything wrong.’
As dull as his green-screen work may have been, Everett says the completed film looks fantastic. He says the same of Shrek the Third, remarking ‘This one is so beautiful looking, it’s unbelievable. The sea tones, how they’ve done water, the skin tones, the magic-hour dusk shots and sunrises’just sensationally beautiful. In that respect, it really is a pleasure to take part in because every time you go back, they’ve done something else. They pay such attention to detail.’
Everett is currently working on a remake of the classic film St. Trinians and is busy promoting his autobiography, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. Shrek the Third opens nationwide on Friday, May 18.
