Walking around the interview room, Rupert Everett shook hands and introduced himself to those waiting for his latest news. He also asked each of us who we were – which is only the third time a celebrity has done that in my 15 years of interviewing. Everett proved he’s indeed a Prince Charming, but not a bit like the self-absorbed one he voices in Shrek 2.

This is the second animation role for Everett. He also voiced a character in Wild Thornberries. “That was a great experience, and this one is as well,” he said. “The DreamWorks Shrek team really wants to push the boundaries in every single area: technical and everything, so they’re very detailed obsessed and they’re very particular, and it is really a fun job to have because it’s not very hard. It’s really interesting and I love it.”

When you said they’re obsessed with detail, how did that show itself? “There are different types of films and people have different levels of handling things. When you have the head of the studio sitting in your sessions, which is a very unusual thing, it’s fantastic. Jeffery Katzenberg is totally involved in this film. You can’t ask for more in our business because it’s getting it right from the top.”

Do you think you look like Prince Charming? “No. I don’t think I look at all like him. I nearly had a crash yesterday while riding on Fairfax in Santa Monica. I was looking up at the poster, and I said which one’s me?”

Were you excited to play the role? “What I loved about my role is being the character who gets to say, ‘Once upon a time long time ago,’ because that’s a thrill. My first memories at the cinema are going to a theater, seeing those curtains open and seeing the Walt Disney logo and the big leather books with the hinges on the side and the lovely lady’s hand who opens it and then the writing of Once upon a time. I can still remember what I felt like seeing that at age 5 or 6. So that was exciting for me. That’s a typical example. In other words that voice starts off as just a narrator and then he leads into being the character. The narrator has to be very lyrical and creamy syrupy voice and then it has to slowly change into a spoiled brat of the Prince Charming character.” 

What’s it like to do voice work? “It’s all about having a lot of vocal expression. It’s not like how we talk to each other because we often talk to each other in a monotone with an upward inflection at the end or a downward inflection at the end depending on where you come from. And that’s not enough for cartoons. In cartoons they want timbre voice tonality, they want you to go up and down, to modulate, to be over expressive because a cartoon character is over expressive in everything, including gesture and facial movement. It’s like two notches up from reality. So that’s a bit of work in a way. It’s quite lucky being English in one sense because you often start your career doing radio or voiceovers for ads and that’s the thing you learn about in drama school.”

How did it feel to play Prince Charming as not the typical Prince Charming?  “Good. It’s easier in a way because if you were going to play just a Prince Charming, it would be a much harder character to play. Playing romantic roles are actually the hardest thing to do because they don’t normally have so much character. Playing a role like this one, Prince Charming with a twist, especially when you’re just doing the voice gives you much more opportunity to do more. So in the end it’s much easier. There are many more tricks you can pull out of the bag. If you’re playing just a classically romantic straight, I don’t mean straight or gay, but just straight down the line character like a Prince Charming, often there is so little to do so it’s much harder. I really enjoyed doing this one. He’s funny.”

What’s next for you? “I’m in Cannes with my French comedy called People. It’s the sequel to Jet Set, which is the most successful movie in French history.  People opens the week after next in Europe, and it’s in French.”

Why didn’t Unconditional Love, your film with Kathy Bates, open on the big screen? “Because New Line Cinema decided not to release it. I don’t know what it was but it’s one of the films I’ve made that I like best. It’s a great movie and Kathy Bates is genius in it. Julie Andrews is fantastic in it. I think one of the things was it was P. J. Hogan and me made it. It was our second movie after My Best Friend’s Wedding so they let us go a little overboard financially and then, and here’s the tragedy about our business now, the marketers looked at it and said is it a Latino film, is it a Black film, is it a this film and if it’s not one of those things then they just say oh, we can’t show this film because it doesn’t fit into any marketable group and we have to spend half as much as the movie to market it which was $50 million. So we’ve got to spend another $25 million and we’re incapable of marketing a movie that doesn’t belong to one or two particular groups. And in a way, for me personally it was tragic. But I think also it’s sad because it was a really good family movie.”

Is it true you’ve done a movie with Sharon Stone? “Yes. It’s called The Different Loyalty. It’s a story of about an English spy. James Bond is based on him in a way. He was a man who was a double spy against the Americans and the English for the Russians. At some point in his life he got married to this woman in Beirut. She didn’t know who he was. She met him, they got married and they lived together for five years and one day he literally went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. She suddenly was surrounded by CIA and wondering what was going on? It’s a true story. It’s a very depressing story. It ends in ’63. I play him and she plays the wife.”

What else do you have coming out? “Compleat Female Stage Beauty, produced by Robert De Niro and premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this fall, my French film, and A Walk Through the Woods, a film I did with Emily Watson and Tom Wilkerson, It’s a about a couple, Emily and Tom, who live in the country in England. She starts having an affair with me. We go to a pub, have a couple of drinks and she drives my car home. On the way home she runs over the husband of her cleaning lady and kills him. So the story’s a thriller and a love story that starts with this hit and run car accident and ends up with me playing a very dramatic deathbed scene with leukemia. That’s all I can tell you now.”

No matter what film roles Rupert Everett takes on, he will continue to add his own unique style to the characters he portrays.

(Photo: © 2004 DreamWorks. All Rights Reserved.)