Rupert Graves: ‘Genuinely, it helps in this business being called Rupert’
Costume dramas cast him as a floppy-fringed dreamboat – even though he wasn’t actually posh. Now Rupert Graves has gone from top of the fops to playing a rapping Roman
Rupert Graves’s eldest son got a nasty shock recently when he went on a school trip to see the 1987 Merchant Ivory adaptation of EM Forster’s gay love story Maurice. “He didn’t know I was in it,” the actor says over a morning cappuccino in a north London brasserie. “He went, ‘Argh! No way!’ and ran out.” He actually fled the cinema? “Yeah. ‘I can’t watch my dad naked on screen in front of all my mates. Can’t do it.’” He might also wish to steer clear of A Room with a View, which his father made with the same team two years earlier — his film debut, in fact — and in which he is seen throwing off his clothes to cavort in the lake and scamper through the undergrowth. “He’s not prudish. But seeing your dad naked is a lot for a lad to take.”
Some people would be positively thrilled at the prospect of a naked Rupert Graves: his devoted fans, the GravesDiggers, for example, or Mark Gatiss, screenwriter and star of Sherlock, in which Graves plays Inspector Lestrade. “I’ve had a crush on Rupert Graves since I was 14,” Gatiss admitted in 2014, then added: “Who hasn’t?” Graves, 56, who is today wearing round-framed glasses and a bedhead of salt-and-pepper hair, keeps his kit on in his new film, Horrible Histories the Movie: Rotten Romans, a big-screen version of the popular CBBC franchise which comes on like Monty Python Jr. He plays a centurion whose unexpected pauses keep wrong-footing his underlings. Thinking he is telling them to attack, they gather up their weapons in preparation, when what he has really said, if they’d only waited, is: “‘We attack!’ … would be the words of a rash man.” There’s nothing here to embarrass any of Graves’s five children, give or take the rap he delivers on horseback (sample line: “I’ve got 99 problems but a bridge ain’t one”).