Rupert Everett breezes into the small New York diner where we are meeting with a surly attitude and a carton of soy milk. His dark mood on this cloudy day is less noticeable than the milk, which he hands to the staff behind the counter, asking them to make his coffee using this rather than cow’s milk.

“I’m lactose-intolerant,” he says in a mocking American accent as he slides his surprisingly muscular body into a small booth. “And the reason I’m slightly surly now is that basically, after four months in a play, you can hardly talk.”

Everett arrived in New York at the start of the year to star alongside Angela Lansbury in a well-received Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. On this stormy morning, however, he has dragged himself out of bed to talk about the poet and sexual deviant Lord Byron, about whom he has made two one-hour documentaries for Channel 4.

While he is in great shape — toned, tanned arms emerge from a white V-neck T-shirt, stretched over impressive pecs, and a pair of blue tracksuit trousers cover long, sturdy legs — he looks a little tired. Slightly red eyes sit below his dark, shapely eyebrows, and he hasn’t shaved.

“It’s a challenge for me doing a long time in the theatre,” he says. “I’m so exhausted all the time, but I do feel lucky to be working.”

His work on this side of the Atlantic has, however, brought with it some recent, and fallacious, tabloid stories about rumoured plastic surgery, following the publication of “before” and “after” pictures in glossy gossip magazines.

“That’s just pathetic,” he says. “This is where perception overtakes truth. Those images went all the way round the world, and at one point I lost a job from a great Australian director because of him seeing the before-and-after images in a newspaper. You can protest as much as you like, but they just doctor the photos. So even if you ring up a newspaper and say, I’d love to give you a guided tour of my ears...”

He pauses, picking at a piece of the pink grapefruit a waiter has brought him before he even asks for it.

“That’s where journalists get lazy,” he continues. “They say, ‘Rupert Everett: fag, facelift.’ Actually, there are many more straight actors who’ve had facelifts. In fact, gay actors, who can talk to their women friends, know all

the other things you can do before going to have a facelift. A man shouldn’t really have a facelift, because their faces don’t deal with it well. But it’s not reality; it’s a patronising fantasy. I haven’t had one.”

That clears that up. Then, after a brief pause, he says: “I will have one, probably, at some point.

“I want the Daily Mail to pay for it, though,” he adds forcefully. “I want to say, I do want to have a facelift, let’s go round the world together, and you can pay, and we’ll visit every single surgeon, and we can decide which one I have, and the Daily Mail can cover the whole operation, which I think would be genius. But nobody will do it because it contradicts their version of reality.”

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