STAGE : Bashing the Boards With the Tempestuous Rupert Everett

Bad boy Rupert is nowhere in sight.

The British newspaper clippings attest to his grand manner, the sulky posing, the dismissive arrogance, the flamboyantly punkish dress. But, today, laughing as he pulls a large pillow away from his libido-charged Labrador, Rupert Everett is surprisingly low-key, unaffected, accessible. So he’s fashionably sockless. So his striped pants are defiantly ripped at the knees. So his natural inclination is to glower at the camera. This Rupert Everett overwhelms not by his star-bravura but by his gentility.

Ironically, the part that brings him to Los Angeles is a full-tilt scenery-chewer: playing opposite Stephanie Beacham as desperate, drug-addicted society bad boy Nicky Lancaster in Noel Coward’s “The Vortex” at the Doolittle Theatre (through March 31). It’s a role the Scottish-born, formerly London-based actor has played twice before: at Scotland’s Glasgow Theatre in 1988 and at London’s Garrick Theatre in ’89.

“It’s an investment, really,” Everett, 31, said in explaining his return to the play. “It’s a great piece of work. If you find a project that really works for you, it can help you a great deal; it can re-invest your movie career. It’s like doing a long audition speech. Every play I’ve had a success in has been really good for everything else I’ve done. I got my last movie (the upcoming “The Comfort of Strangers”) from this, because Paul Schrader came to see it in London and really liked me in it.”

If that sounds like a calculating means to an end, it’s not too far off base.

“I don’t like the theater,” Everett shrugged, sipping a purplish protein concoction in the kitchen of his airy Laurel Canyon rental. “I never go to it, so I feel a little bit uncomfortable doing it from that point of view. I just think it’s so boring. I don’t see what its role is now--theater in general. I like going to movies, watching films. I love the intensity of the camera work; it’s so beautiful to watch. I suppose if you’ve been brought up on television, you’re used to seeing everything close up.”

His antipathy towards the theater has as much to do with the players as the form.

“I’ve always been disappointed by stage actors,” he said. “When you’re 15 and you go into theater, it’s an incredible twilight zone: red velvet, shiny lights, darkness, glamour, sex. I saw it very much as an escape from the (upper-class) background I came from. But it turned out it was exactly like my background--really staid, really bourgeois, really class-status-obsessed. Boring, uninformed people who weren’t investigating their lives at all: ‘Hello, darling, are you playing golf this weekend?’ ”

And so Everett directs his dark, rangy, brooding presence toward film. Some of his efforts, such as “Another Country” and “Dance With a Stranger,” have been extremely well-received; others, such as “Duet for One” and “Hearts of Fire,” were not.

“It’s sort of a nightmare, the highs and lows,” he said pleasantly. “You have a year of doing well, then two years of doing really badly. A lot of people drop out. I think being able to keep going is the hardest thing about acting. If at the age of 50 you’re still going up for things and not sure you’re going to get them, it’s pretty undignified, pretty sad.”

The son of a retired army major, Everett admits that the “Gypsy glamour of the emotionally unstable actor” has lost much of its earlier appeal.

“I think now I’ve arrived at the limit,” he said with a sigh. “I just don’t know if I really want to live a kind of life that’s so unsure--always having to sustain, keep going, keep doing something better, more interesting.” In spite of his general distaste for theater, he makes an exception for “The Vortex.”

“It’s informative, interesting, beautiful in the commercial movie sense, strange-looking, a grand good piece of entertainment,” Everett stressed. “I’m enjoying doing it here. The audiences get it; they’re very responsive.” The story centers on the country weekend of British socialite Florence Lancaster--desperately trying to hold onto her youth with a succession of young lovers--and her 24-year-old son, Nicky, who has just returned home from Paris with a new fiancee and a new heroin habit.

“The reason I wanted to do the play was in the late ‘70s there was a phenomenon in the aristocratic English youth: They all became junkies,” said Everett. “It was really fashionable--and really out of hand. I felt I’d lived through weekends like that, watching people I knew. So I collaged my experiences onto what was, as written, someone who was dabbling, who’d gotten much heavier into drugs than he knew. The point is, he’s just like his mother: too weak and not interested in anything besides himself. A victim of the times, poor choices and no discipline.”

Everett, too, was raised in a life of privilege, part of which included being shipped off to boarding school at the tender age of 7. Although he considers the uprooting traumatic--and the entire tradition “stupid”--he voices no regrets. “I’m not into blame,” the actor said firmly. “(The early separation) takes things from you, but it gives you things as well. Maybe if I’d stayed at home I might’ve been more rooted and able to deal with people, but maybe I would’ve lost out on another side of my life that I like equally as much.”

But then, it was not such smooth sailing. Everett (who plays the piano, violin and clarinet) rebeled often and early; after a succession of schools, he quit at age 15. Next came an abortive stint at the Central School of Speech and Drama, behind-the-scenes work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and acting with Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.

The inclination to perform set in early.

“As a child, I always wanted to make people laugh,” he recalled. “I was always showing off--for other children, my family, my family’s friends.” His older brother, Simon, “was no competition,” he said wryly. “I was much better at it.” Yet when it came to pursuing acting as a career, Everett received little parental support: “I think they thought it wouldn’t last very long, that it’d be a total disaster, that I’d never get a job. And at first, I didn’t know I was good. I think I sort of dreamt I could be good.”

Celebrity came first with his stage role as a homosexual student in “Another Country.” Before long, his playboy/party boy image and press run-ins had earned him the reputation of an enfant terrible.

“I’m a rather difficult person sometimes,” he acknowledged. “I am very volatile; I can be in a very bad mood. I suppose some people are very professional and can get it together (for a reporter). I’m not a professional publicity machine. I find the whole thing very difficult. I don’t think it’s nice to always have to reveal yourself, and of course reveal yourself well-- and you’re not always well. Also, the English press can be very nasty, famously unattractive. The whole British mentality is based on breaking people down.”

Anyway, he’s perfectly willing to critique himself. “I’m pleased with some of the things I’ve done,” he said candidly. “I’m not saying I’m pleased with my personality as a whole, because I’m not, necessarily.” The same goes for his looks. “I don’t think I have a particularly good-looking face,” Everett said, “but I photograph well. Though I’d much rather be smaller. I don’t know how tall I am, really. Maybe 6-3, 6-4--I stopped counting after 6 feet. But I hate being tall. I wish I were 5-11.”