Interview with Sir Ian McKellen (Part 3 of 4)

By Kenneth Plume

IGN FilmForce interviewer Kenneth Plume recently talked to Sir Ian McKellen.

In his 40-year career as an actor, McKellen has appeared in more than forty films and scores of theatrical productions. His film credits include Six Degrees of Separation, Richard III, Gods and Monsters, and Apt Pupil, as well as this weekend's X-Men and the highly anticipated Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In his four-part conversation with Ken, McKellen discusses his start as an actor, his views on acting, entertainment and filmmaking today, and his work on Richard III, Gods and Monsters, Apt Pupil, X-Men and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

CLICK HERE to access the first installment of the interview. CLICK HERE to access the second installment.

PLUME: What kind of fulfillment do you get, personally, from acting?

MCKELLEN: Always the group that I'm working with. I move from job to job, from family to family, from group of friends to group of friends – sometimes they're old friends, but often they're new ones. For the time of working, the experience is so intense – it's like you're all climbing Everest together, or going on a trek or a journey. You're all interdependent… You've all got your different jobs – some more crucial than others, maybe – but you're all needed. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing for a human being, because that's living life as it's meant to be. You're in your own village. Some people may enjoy being the leader of the village… That's not really my style. I just like being there, and in it. That's the satisfaction that I get.

On top of that, of course, I want the audience to enjoy the work that we create, because that's why we're doing it. We're always thinking about, "Will people like it? Will people understand it? Will people be moved by it?" To get high-fallutin', "Are their lives be altered by it?" That's the focus of your attention. And on top of that, personally, I say to myself, "Can I do this? Is this something I can do?" I'm always taking parts that I don't think I can play, and that – for me – is the trick. Don't play a part that you know you can do… It's likely to be boring and you're likely to repeat yourself and you may get into bad habits… but if it's something you don't know you can do, you're going to be asking questions about it, you're going to be worrying about it, puzzling about it, thinking about it, working hard at it, asking advice. The achievement – if you've managed to pull it off to your own satisfaction, or the director's, or the audiences', or the critics'… Well, that's why it's the best job in the world for me

PLUME: It sounds similar to mountain climbing, to some extent – you hope you never run across Everest, because after you climb Everest, what do you do after that?

MCKELLEN: Well, you get to the top of one mountain, and often, "Oh bugger me, there's another one!" You haven't got to the top. You never finish… You only finish when your boots wear out and you think, "Oh god, I'm going back to first base… No, in fact I'm not, I'm going home." I'm not going home just yet.

PLUME: If you were to look around and take stock right now, would you say that you were happy with where you're going?

MCKELLEN: Yeah, I'm about halfway up, I would think.

PLUME: And no idea if there's another mountain beyond that…

MCKELLEN: Who knows! It's thrilling. I've gotten myself into a situation – mainly by luck, but also by a lot of hard work – where I can choose the company I keep and the work that I do. The judgement I usually make is "Is this a story worth telling?" and if I'm not entirely sure I can do it, and I ask the director, "Can I do it?" – and, of course, he's going to say "Yes," or else I wouldn't have been cast – well, then, on we go. You ask anyone who's running any sort of race or playing any sort of match or doing any sort of athletic enterprise – they're not certain they can do it. That's why they're doing it… To prove that they can. But they don't know, do they, until they hit the tape or get to the top.

PLUME: Do you have any aspirations beyond acting?

MCKELLEN: No…

PLUME: Or is this what your happiest doing?

MCKELLEN: Within my own life outside acting, yes. I don't want to become a politician or – even within the business – I don't want to be a director. I've tried that , and I'm no good at it. There are too many opportunities, fortunately, for me. If I wasn't allowed to make films for some reason, there's the theater – and vice-versa. If I lost a leg and couldn't walk, I could always do radio. Fortunately, there's a lot of areas in which people can act. I think I might like to get more involved with young actors who are learning how to do it – not because I think I know how they should do it, but I'd like to see how they do it. I do like the company of young people, and I don't want to get old in the sense of, "I know how it's done. Things aren't as good as they used to be…"

PLUME: You don't want to be isolationist…

MCKELLEN: No, not at all. Of course, that's another wonderful thing about acting – when you're on the journey, there are likely to be people who are older than you and younger than you and you encounter different experiences and different nationalities. It's a very, very, very privileged way of life, because it's so fulfilling.

PLUME: Do you see a time when you'll actively withdraw from the business, say along the lines of Alec Guinness?

MCKELLEN: He's much older than I am… I don't know. Energies can run out in your 80's, obviously – though John Gielgud changed his agent the year before he died. Last year, for instance, after I did a very hard spell of theater – I did 3 plays, one after the other in a regional company in the UK – and I said to myself, "For the rest of the century – for the rest of 1999 – I'm not going to work unless a wonderful film part comes up, and if it doesn't, I'm not going to worry." That meant that I didn't work for 7 months – until I did X-Men. It was almost shocking, what a good time I had.

PLUME: Was it reinvigorating?

MCKELLEN: Yes. I did quite a lot of traveling, I was with friends, and did enjoy – I must say – not having to get up early to go to work and not having to go out in the evening to work, as you have to do in theater. I was able to have a drink when I wanted, to eat when I wanted, and if I fancied to suddenly to go off for a weekend somewhere or other, I did. I got a hint of what I've missed in my life, because I have worked pretty well non-stop.

PLUME: So you found the joy of "The Sabbatical"…

MCKELLEN: Yeah.

PLUME: Do you find it nice to be at a point in your career where you can go off and do that, and know that your career will still be waiting for you when you come back?

MCKELLEN: Yes… Absolutely.

PLUME: It's not something that's afforded to many actors…

MCKELLEN: No, it isn't.

PLUME: I want to touch on a couple of your films now, so – if you could – give me your recollections and experiences of working on the them… We'll start with Richard III…

MCKELLEN: Well, I've written a book about it, you know… It's the screenplay, and it's got an extensive introduction and notes explaining why we did what we did with every cut and every scene. It's available through my website.

Richard III was immensely satisfying, because it was my own idea. We'd played it for two years in the theater – on and off, and across the world – and I knew it was a very popular version of the play with audiences. I thought that the production would transfer very well to film, so I wrote the screenplay. Then I had to get it made. When the first day of shooting came and after all the desperate work – over 3 years, during which time I'd just been doing these other films I was talking about – I saw Annette Bening in costume, two mighty trains that used to belong to Adolf Hitler puffing steam, 50 horses and wranglers, a few dogs… and there I was in my uniform surrounded by a hundred extras and technicians and the sun was shining, and it was all because I said to myself one day, "Wouldn't it be wonderful to make a film." As you can imagine, that felt good.

McKellen as James Whale in Gods and Monsters Photo/Image by Annie Fishbein

PLUME: Next… Gods and Monsters…

MCKELLEN: I don't think any work has been closer to myself than that film was, at the point in which I made it. It was not just a leading part in a Hollywood movie, but it was a group of independent filmmakers who I found very congenial, in that their aspirations for their work are very much what mine are. The fact that the leading part was a gay man, and an Englishman once more – and yet it was about Hollywood. It was about what it's like to be involved in my industry – and the man had been an actor most of his life before he became a director, and had an actor's temperament and an actor's self-regard and awareness.

Everything just came together beautifully. Although it was a very short shoot – four weeks – there was nothing wrong with anything…. The script, the director, the crew, the cast. Then, when people said they liked it, and I got something like 15 best-acting awards for it. That's when I knew it was good and had been done exactly the way that I've been describing and it worked – the satisfaction was total, really. I don't despair, but it's unlikely that will ever happen again.

PLUME: As a tangent, you are one of the few openly gay leading actors in Hollywood today, in an atmosphere that talks liberally a lot of the time, but still don't practice what they preach to some extent. Have you found that in any way difficult, or have you found that people really not even consider it when casting?

MCKELLEN: Well if they do, they don't tell me about it, of course. Since I came out, the self-confidence that I was talking about has been complete. I'm my own person, now. For so many years – every gay person knows this – they've been lying… to somebody. They've been dishonest. They've often become dependent on that and figured it as a way of life, and they can't imagine any other way. They'd be lost without it. Why so many people stay in the closet is that they think this is how it was meant to be. I know men who come out discover that, "No, that's the old you, and the new you is someone who other people – on the whole – prefer, sometimes admire, because people like honesty on the whole."

My film career took off. Of the 20-odd parts I've played since coming out, only 3 have been gay… I've not been typecast. There may have been parts that I wouldn't have been considered for, but if we're talking about romantic leads – I've smooched with Greta Scacchi on-screen. I've played John Profumo, the English politician, who nobody remembers except he was a raging heterosexual who made love to Joanne Whalley-Kilmer under silk sheets. I played a straight rapist in a Western.

PLUME: And audiences don't seem to care one way or the other…

MCKELLEN: No, of course they don't.

PLUME: People in control of studios and networks make assumptions that there will be some massive wave of protest, but what it should really come down to – straight or gay – is talent…

MCKELLEN: That's right… and the job is called "acting." You go to look at that. When you see me, you're not seeing me – you're seeing me acting as somebody. Audiences understand this… Producers seem to have a problem with it. Really, it's not the producers, it's the people who are trying to make the money – I'm talking now about television advertisers – because they are the people who make money out of anything done on television, and a lot of what's on television is film. Advertisers have to sell us the lie that we're all the same, because if we believe we're all the same, we'll all want to buy their product. The fact is, we're not all the same. The rest of us understand that, and that's why we like to go and watch television and see movies and theater – not to see ourselves, but to see something different.

PLUME: And also, to a larger degree, the attitudes of advertisers are based on perception on whether something would be the case, rather than reality…

MCKELLEN: I fear that the wonderful British television program Queer as Folk is going to be made into an American television series. They're changing one of the central characters ages from 15 to 18, because they're frightened about what the audiences and the authorities might think if they showed a 15 year-old having gay sex on television – but that is the point of the story. That's rather like saying, "Hamlet isn't a university student – he's a happily married man of 35." You've got to laugh. I laugh at them and get on with my life.

PLUME: And why is Hamlet's father dead? That's unhappy…

MCKELLEN: You can only speak from your own experience, and my experience is that it has been entirely beneficial, to me personally – to my career, to my life, to my relationships, to my relationships with my family, to my love-life. If you talk to other gay men and women and ask them do they regret coming out, I bet you wouldn't be able to find one of them who would answer that they did regret it. I have to think selfishly that it's been good for me, it's good for other people and – in the end, and importantly, really – it's good for the world. I'm not trying to solve the world's problems… Just my own.