‘90s movie star Rupert Everett admits he ‘ruined’ himself in quest for perfect body that left him ‘almost crippled’
Topics: Celebrity
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Featured Image Credit: Sebastien Courdji/Getty Images
Topics: Celebrity
Rupert Everett has candidly spoken out about the hidden cost of fame as he shared the serious consequences he suffered while trying to maintain a Hollywood-approved appearance.
The 67 year old actor, starred in multiple movies throughout the 90’s, with 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, alongside Julia Roberts still one of his most beloved performances to date.
Yet while the star looked picture perfect on camera, maintaining such a physique wasn’t without its struggles, with Everett explaining how his quest for perfection had actually led to permanent damage.
“I ruined myself,” he told the Guardian. “Now I’m almost crippled as a result.”
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“I could never be bothered to do all those things, like stretching, which were necessary for lifting weights, because your tendons get tighter and tighter,” he continued. “So boring. I didn’t do any of that. So now my demise will be musculoskeletal, I think.”
Early on his life, Everett admitted that he had felt like a ‘freak’, likening himself to ‘Gollum’ at the tender of age of 15 when he was still only a mere 5ft tall.
Things rapidly changed from there, with the star skyrocketing to 6ft 4 in just three years - with the change an adjustment he wasn’t strictly ready for.
“My arse was like two bones and a hole. And my legs were skeletal,” he recalled, while revealing that he didn’t know what to do with his new body, or even how to stand up and hold himself properly.
While he would ultimately go on to build himself a new muscular body in the gym in the years that followed, before that he hit on a far smaller solution. “I met these two queens in Tufnell Park who made bodysuits, and they made me a false bottom, false calves, false shoulders, false everything.”
It was with these fake augmentations that he lived his life, even appearing on camera while wearing them ‘in everything’, without ever disclosing to the director that it wasn’t his natural body.
Eventually he became comfortable enough to swap them out for some hard-built muscles after hours in the gym, but even then he wasn’t completely happy.
Reflecting on his appearance in his prime, Everett explained: “I was wonderful-looking at one point. I had muscles. Everything.”
“It was quite short-lived,” he added. “I call it my Hollywood year.”
Yet even despite acknowledging how good he looked, he still couldn’t shake a lingering feeling of inadequacy, which continued to linger like a shadow throughout his peak performance years.
“Even work was about cruising, really. Trying to be attractive,” he recalled. “Which obviously came from the feeling of not being attractive enough.”
“My vanity for me wasn’t about ‘mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’. Vanity is often a feeling of deep insecurity rather than feeling how fabulous I am,” Everett added.
Having sworn off the gym to focus instead on walks with his Labrador, these days the actor is trying to take a more measured approach to life, which includes having ditched his earlier drug and party going exploits after marrying his husband Henrique, a Brazilian accountant, in 2024.
“I always thought when I was still clubbing and hanging out that I’d be one of those 75-year-olds in a tie-dye T-shirt at raves,” he admitted, before confessing those days are long gone as he isn’t ‘remotely interested’ in such frivolities.
“Well, I’m hardly interested in anything any more,” he added. “I’m interested in dust particles and things like that. I could quite happily sit just watching spring.”