Actor Rupert Everett has said he lost out on “three or four” roles in big Hollywood films because he is gay.
In a Press Association interview, the star described the film industry as “aggressively heterosexual,” adding that gay performers are treated like “second-class citizens.”
Everett, 59, said: “I think it has forced me always to try and be creative, to try and make something up.”
He is now the writer, director and star of “The Happy Prince,” in which he plays Oscar Wilde.
Everett added: “There’s tons of roles that I haven’t got for lots of different reasons, some of them probably for not being a good enough actor, actually, or doing a lousy audition. All that counts.
“But there were three or four big films, when I was successful, that I was absolutely blocked from, when the director and the other actors wanted me to be in the film, by a studio, just for the fact of being gay.
“That does absolutely happen. But at the same time it has been the making of me as well.
“The struggle that has forced me to have has been great, in a way.
“I think my career as a writer would not have happened if I had been heterosexual, active, working non-stop.”