Fry talked about his lifelong fascination with the character he has played more than once. He also gave some thought to the ongoing controversy surrounding both the man and the movie.

PRAIRIE MILLER: When did you first become fascinated by Wilde?

STEPHEN FRY: I became aware of him as a very young boy. My mother read his children's stories to me. I was entranced by that. He was just sort of always there, like the queen, or the Beatles. Something that was in your head all the time. I just always knew he was around.

He caused a kind of devotion where everyone agreed who sat around a dinner table with him, that when you got up you felt ten feet tall. You thought he was brilliant, but he didn't make you feel less brilliant. It was the kind of brilliance that can change the colors of things, and make the world suddenly look like a more remarkable place. It can make you participate in that person's intelligence. That's what Wilde had, a huge generosity of spirit.

And I played him twice before. I once played Wilde in a cameo for a television western series in the United States. I remember riding into town in a buggy. It was Texas, and I remember punching a villain. It wasn't very Wildean, but it was exciting. It was good fun. Wilde, of course did tour America.

PM: You portray Wilde as someone very much unlike the dandy image we usually have of him. What idea did you have of Wilde the person for this movie?

SF: I saw Wilde as a sentimentalist, which is a very good thing to be. Like Humphrey in Casablanca. But as far as I'm concerned, yes, it's very important that we don't see him as this sort of peacock, this kind of posing, prancing queen.

PM: Wilde is seen as a pretty messed up guy in his romantic relationships. What is your take on that? SF: I think we have all experienced passion that is not in any sense reasonable. Reason and passion are not that connected after all. You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that. But there is such a thing as what is called the thunderbolt. It's just simply a huge love which has nothing to do with reason.

Some people see the film and they think, how can someone as intelligent as Oscar Wilde, someone with so much insight, so much wisdom, fall in love with someone so unworthy as Bosie. He wrote about it himself, when he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison. There are many other people who would have just considered Oscar's feelings, and Bosie never did that.

But that's why the story is worth telling, because we all need reminding. We feel guilty about our own inadequacies emotionally, and even someone as great as Oscar Wilde is no better off than we are. Having a great intellect is no path to being happy. The great intellect, insight and artistry of Wilde was never going to make him happy, in and of itself.

But he was at least brave enough to know that he should live who he was, that he should realize his nature. He was into something much more important, which was to be a proper human being. It has much more to do, as art crucially is, with realizing yourself. And he was wonderful at that.

PM: Did you worry about controversy around your depiction of Wilde's homosexuality?

SF: There are two types of puritans. There's a puritan who would find any of the sexual scenes in the film distasteful and unnecessary. And the other is the in your face gay rights groups, who would want Oscar to be something he wasn't. The ones who would see it as, oh it's another tragedy about how sad it is to be gay.

I fully expected some of the British gay magazines to come at me all full of this kind of nonsense. And in fact they didn't, which was a great relief. It's an insult to everybody if you start revising history in order to please a single group.

PM: Why was the decision made to be graphic about Wilde's sexuality in the movie?

SF: It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.

PM: After living inside of Wilde's skin for this movie, what do you feel is his enduring significance?

SF: Wilde is deeply important and symbolic. He symbolizes something very powerful about art, and about not closing down. About experimenting and finding out who you are, that urge to prove who you are in the world. I think that's why Wilde is so deeply important, and will continue to be. He is, to put it in a rather vulgar way, perhaps the premier tee shirt of all time! He's in that sense an icon that will never fade. It's that you believe in something outside the normal run of moral fixity, that you believe in an openness, freedom and individuality.

PM: What are you going to surprise us with next?

SF: I have just completed a film with John Travolta called A Simple Action, and it should open later this year. I did get sent a part for some Macaulay Culkin film to play a butler. And I thought, I can't do this! If I start doing this, I'm going to be doing British butlers all over the place, so I didn't do it.

I mean far better actors than me, like John Gielgud have played butlers. You can get a bit associated with that, though there are worse things to be associated with. But let's face it, I'm never going to get any of the parts that DiCaprio has turned down. So you've got to be realistic in this world!

PM: Do you ever get affected by bad notices?

SF: I think I'm better about that than I used to be. I mean, I'm not ever going to like them. I might laugh at a review because it's so unpleasant, and so wrong. It's not the criticism, but it's when people interpret your motives wrongly. I think that's what is upsetting. It can be that off the wall in what they say. It's when people who have never met you think they know you as a person, that is a very peculiar thing. But of course I've done the same thing myself!