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By: Nigel Robinson

Rupert Everett thinks Michael Jackson is better off dead.

Rupert Everett thinks that Michael Jackson is better off dead.

The actor who is openly gay and the same age as Jackson was when he died made his controversial comments in New York to the Daily Mirror.

Everett described the musician as a ‘black-to-white’ minstrel and said that it was fortuitous that Jackson died when he did.

‘He was supposed to be doing fifty concerts in London,’ he said. ‘It wouldn't have mattered how good or bad he was. He wouldn't have managed to do all of them and the press would have destroyed him.

‘He personified the pain and anxiety of a black man in a slave country. We all watched as he changed from black to white. He was living performance art.’

‘We're living in very strange times,’ he continued. ‘We have Michael Jackson, a black man who has gone white, and we have President Barack Obama, who is a half-white man gone black. It's absolutely fascinating to watch.’

Even though he thought the later Michael Jackson was a ‘freak’, Everett did reveal that he thought the pre-plastic surgery Jackson was sexy.

‘I would have leapt at the chance of sleeping with Michael Jackson when I was fourteen,’ he admitted.