Sir Ian McKellen on criticism, ageing and still being Gandalf
With a genial, whiskery grin, Sir Ian McKellen is peering down into his Zoom camera, the angle familiar to anyone who might have played a hobbit to his Gandalf. He’s at home in East London’s Limehouse, where he’s the co-owner of a nearby riverside pub and where he’s been spending more time after an accident at work. Playing Falstaff in Player Kings, a condensed take on Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Parts 1 and 2, he tumbled off stage during a fight scene at the Noel Coward Theatre in June, fracturing a wrist and chipping a vertebra. It could have been worse, he says later, but the extra padding of the famously corpulent character’s costume cushioned his front-row landing.
Coincidentally, much of his new movie – the reason for our chat – is also set on and off the West End stage. In The Critic, McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, the all-powerful theatre reviewer for the Daily Chronicle during the 1930s. When there’s a threat to his privileged, in-the-closet existence, Erskine turns devious and manipulative. The film is loosely based on the 2015 novel Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn, itself a pastiche of 1930s murder mysteries, in which the Erskine character wasn’t as prominent but who a Guardian reviewer described as a “Falstaffian monster”. The book was adapted by screenwriter Patrick Marber (Closer), and directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, And When Did You Last See Your Father?).
McKellen’s waspish turn as Erskine rather runs away with the film as it spins a tale of intrigue involving an actress (Gemma Arterton), the Chronicle’s new proprietor (Mark Strong) and his son-in-law (Ben Barnes) among others.
After Gandalf, I got an awful lot of parts of old people. I mean very old people – like God
January will mark 25 years since a 60-year-old McKellen arrived in New Zealand to begin playing Gandalf, a role he reprised a decade later in The Hobbit films. And he says he wouldn’t mind putting on the wizard’s hat one more time in the forthcoming new Lord of the Rings movie project – The Hunt for Gollum, to be directed by Gollum himself, Andy Serkis, and produced by Peter Jackson.
And last month marked 60 years since McKellen’s first appearance in the West End for the play A Scent of Flowers, which, helped by good reviews, led to him joining Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company alongside Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi.
Your early career would have benefited from reviewers like Erskine?
Yes, it did. I’ve never been frightened of critics, because I knew one when I was growing up – I was at school with the son of the local critic of the Bolton Evening News, our local paper, but it had its own drama critic, John Wardle. He had been an actor and I knew him when he acted still for the local amateur company that I used to pop out with a little bit. The amusing thing is that his son, Irving Wardle, who went to my school and played Hamlet after university, became a critic himself. He was the drama critic of the Times in London. Early on at university, drama critics from the national papers used to come to Cambridge and review our undergraduate efforts. So, by the time I finished at Cambridge, I had a string of reviews that I could point to and say, “Look, I’m already in the business”, and that rather made up for not going to drama school. Yes, critics have perhaps, on the whole, been a bit too kind to me over the years, but I’m not grumbling.
Did he remind you of any other characters you might have played?
No, I don’t think so. That’s one of the questions I asked myself about a potential job. Is this a part I’ve already played? After Gandalf, I got an awful lot of parts of old people. I mean very old people – like God – and they weren’t particularly interesting, because it was territory I had already trampled. But no, Jimmy didn’t remind me of anybody I knew or had played. Of course, he’s gay like me in a time when that was a real difficulty for people, it being against the law. So that of course, was of interest to me. It was an enjoyable character to get hold of. It was a smashing part.
He’s not likable, but he’s compelling in his vindictiveness.