Ian McKellen is wearing complicated boots, skinny jeans, a tightish shirt and a bright herringbone jacket that, as fashion demands, is about three sizes too small for him. Being McKellen — aka Magneto (X-Men) and Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings) — he carries this off much better than your average 70-something would. Perhaps his secret is not pretending to be young.
“Sometimes I wake up and look in the mirror — if I can see — and think, ‘Ooof! I’m 76 next week — 76! That’s old,’ ” he says.
“And I know it’s old because a lot of my friends regularly die, and they’re my age.”
Sitting in the globalised nothingness of London’s Canary Wharf Four Seasons hotel (he lives — and owns a pub, the Grapes — nearby), we talk about age a lot. Inevitable, really: in his new movie, Mr Holmes, he plays Sherlock in both his 90s and his 60s. For him, of course, this is kids’ stuff. Gandalf was a 7000-year-old.
The older Holmes is, cognitively, going downhill and desperately trying to reassemble his memories. McKellen’s mind, in contrast, seems to be fine, but he has been going through the same process. (His mother died when he was 12, his father when he was 24.) “With my cousin Margaret the other day, I was looking at some photographs — they’re of my young parents — and thinking, she would never see me grow up, and neither of them knew she’d got breast cancer, and they’d no idea what the future was, and they looked so happy and beautiful. I have an emotional response to it. I’ve got some letters from my father to my stepmother, and I don’t think I will be able to read them.”
Remembrance may now be a professional necessity as he nervously edges towards a memoir. There have been talks with publishers, and he has his first line: “I know exactly where and when I decided to try to be a professional actor.”
“It was outside the Arts Theatre in Cambridge,” he explains. “I could take you to the flagstone where I was standing. The publishers have actually persuaded me it’s worth doing. I’m not convinced. I don’t have a lot to say. I think, just in a fantasy world, I would like to have written some wonderful poems, I would like to have written a novel. I’ve never sat down with a blank sheet of paper and thought about it. But, you know, why should I? I’m good at what I do and I can carry on doing it. I’ve not run out of steam.”
As he has often said, actors leave few tangible traces, even though they leave behind films and TV: “A few films,” he muses, “though they’ll look terribly dated.” Yet McKellen, for all his modesty, does have another legacy — that of campaigner, most famously for gay rights. This writer interviewed him in 1988, when he came out and attached himself to the cause. Then, he was slightly bemused by this new role.
How did that happen? There is a long pause.
This may be deep thought or it may be puzzlement about what he is expected to say. Finally: “I’ve always been a bit shy, and I’ve always supposed that what appealed to me about acting was that I could stand up in public and draw attention to myself and not feel shy, because I was protected by the fact that I knew what the next line was.”
He became one of the founders of the Actors Company, a co-operative, and discovered he could handle meetings, even chairing some. He emerged as a public figure in 1979, when he took part in a march against value-added tax on theatre tickets. “I spoke with my own voice right out of my head! Now, that was all before the gay stuff, but I was sort of preparing for it.”
I remind him that at our encounter in 1988, I provoked him by quoting some remarks of the philosopher Roger Scruton about childless gays’ lack of obligation to the future. “Doesn’t it seem so old-fashioned now?” he says. “It’s gone, all that. The distant days of Section 28 [a Thatcher-era rule against ‘promoting’ homosexuality]. It’s astonishing for a British Tory prime minister to insist on gay marriage, dragging the party behind him. I suppose it’s possible because I live in a small country and you only have to persuade about 50 people, all of whom live within sight of this window, and if they agree, they can have it in law within a year.
“I can bear witness now. I know what I’m talking about. That isn’t true of much else in my life. I know I’m right. It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s what any religious person feels. I’ve got God on my side, but I don’t need God, I know I’m right.”
These evangelical flames may well be fanned by a degree of guilt. He never came out to his parents, even though he was living with a man well before his father died. He later did to his stepmother. “When I told them, one by one they said, ‘We’ve known for 30 years.’ They were puzzled that I hadn’t mentioned it before.”
Not telling his father is where the guilt lies. “It wasn’t fair of me. You’re 24, you’re living with another man, you know that about yourself, your father loves you, is always asking how you are in every possible way, and I think, ‘If he’d lived a bit longer, I would have told him.’ We couldn’t really have a proper relationship until I had. I didn’t give him a chance to say ‘That’s all right’, then get interested in my life from that point of view.”
Of course, the other great dynamic in his life, one he shares with Kenneth Branagh, Anthony Hopkins and many others, is the move from British stage maestro to US (and, in his case, New Zealand) blockbuster fodder. Ever since 2001, his Gandalf has been striding the antipodean ranges; and ever since 2000, he has been bending metal as Magneto.
This has made him rich, but also famous in an entirely new way. For one thing, he travels on the London Tube and gets recognised. “It’s amazing they know who I am. They don’t bother me. I don’t think they’d tangle with Gandalf or Magneto. But when they do, they only want to say something nice, and that’s not bad, you know. About once a day, someone comes up to me and thanks me. That’s lovely, lovely. That’s the sort of recognition I get, not wanting to touch me and scream or anything like that.”
Perhaps not telling the truth about his sexuality taught him the art of self-concealment, essential for any actor. Indeed, at Cambridge he deliberately ditched his Lancashire accent in favour of received posh pronunciation, another act of concealment. He had been mocked for his flat vowels. “I didn’t like being mocked. I also thought it would help with acting, so I changed it. I shouldn’t have bothered. Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney and Alan Bates were older than me, and were doing the classics in northern accents. I’m slipping back into my accent now.”
He defends becoming yet another Sherlock Holmes in Shakespearean terms. “If you do Romeo or Hamlet, you know stacks of actors have done it before, but that doesn’t put you off. The idea of playing a part that a lot of other people have played is not alarming.”
Mr Holmes is an odd thing, but it keeps you watching, which is, perhaps, all that matters. He says: “It’s nice to be offered a big part in a small film after those small parts in big films.”
Next, with Patrick Stewart, he is bringing their production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, a great success on Broadway, to London. He has also just returned with Derek Jacobi in the ITV sitcom Vicious. They play Freddie and Stuart, two gays who have been together for 50 years. And he will appear as a clock in a new Disney version of Beauty and the Beast.
There will be no more Gandalf: the franchise is on hold. Christopher Tolkien is resisting further use of his father’s works. And there will be no more Magneto: “Michael Fassbender is, I suspect, the future.” But there will be much more McKellen in one form or another, even if that memoir never gets beyond the first line. (He asked me how to write a book, and I told him to start work at 6am. He looked shocked.)
I leave him, dressed young, but acting his age as Magneto, Gandalf and now Sherlock, tangible traces of a great actor’s life.
