“It’s been an enforced retirement and part of me says, ‘Well, at my age, what’s wrong with that?’”
As loath as we are to call out Sir Ian McKellen’s economy with the truth, Britain’s best-loved thespian can’t help but play to the gallery. Even from the confines of a mid-afternoon Zoom call to no one in particular. So let’s just say that the 82-year-old actor has quite a different understanding of “time off” to you and I.
In the past few months alone he’s finalised the screenplay for a recording of Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor, interviewed MI6 chief Richard Moore about the importance of LGBT+ diversity and is promoting his role in the upcoming movie Infinitum: Subject Unknown. This all apparently counts as a lull in activity for someone whose health is of such national importance that his Covid-19 vaccination made the front page of the BBC News website.
To the uninitiated, Sir Ian (or just Ian to those familiar) would have you believe his past year or so has been spent in near-on hibernation. “I’ve been sleeping, cooking, reading. I’m very lucky to have a close neighbour who I’ve been almost in a bubble with,” he says. “I’ve not been cut off like some folks.”
Truthfully, Infinitum is as good an example of his voracious appetite for work as anything else. A new indie sci-fi movie that’s vaguely akin to Groundhog Day meets The Matrix, it was shot entirely on an iPhone during Britain’s very first lockdown. As he’s done in many an epic, McKellen’s role was to set the pseudo-science-inspired scene with requisite gravitas while being directed by someone on the other side of a video call. If that seems strange to you then it’s table stakes for someone who’s spent a considerable amount of time cosplaying as a thousands-year-old wizard in front of a giant green screen.
Long before he got involved in Middle Earth, McKellen’s career was defined by a similar ingenuity to that which created Infinitum. His successful interview for St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 1958 featured an impromptu recital of Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach” soliloquy, while his transition to cinema was kickstarted when he took it upon himself to write the script for 1995’s Oscar-nominated Richard III after a little prompting. “I was an ignoramus,” he says. “We’d done the play at the National Theatre and did a lengthy tour, so I said to Richard Eyre, who directed it, ‘Wouldn’t this make a good film?’ ‘Oh, yeah. Well, you can’t make a film unless there’s a screenplay…’”
In the case of Infinitum, its script came together in the space of four weeks after director Matthew Butler-Hart was sparked into life by an Edgar Wright tweet encouraging London’s indie filmmakers to make the most of lockdown’s empty streets. Shooting with just an iPhone on a gimbal took another month across a few secure locations, including his own home building and an abandoned Wroxton Abbey in north Oxfordshire. While this is by no means the first movie to be created with Apple’s smartphone (the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee and Michel Gondry have all testified as to the tech’s utility in recent years), Covid restrictions enforced an even more DIY ethos upon the shoot.
“It was hugely challenging,” says Tori Butler-Hart, who cowrote, produced and stars in the film. “I had my little Rode mic for sound, but its receiver had to be attached to the iPhone, which then knocked the gimbal’s counterbalance completely off. We ended up breaking one of them trying to recentre it with a whole load of croc clips.”
When the time came to cast a talking head for exposition, Matthew turned to an old neighbour. “Years ago, when I was much younger as an actor, I lived around the corner from Ian and would just bump into him,” he says. “Then I ended up working as his assistant. I had a brilliant job of just reading scripts. ‘Lord Of The Rings? Dunno. See what you think.’”
By all accounts, McKellen didn’t take much persuading to be involved. He talks a lot about his admiration for Matthew and Tori [Butler-Hart] (“They’re thoroughgoing filmmakers”) and wafts his own iPhone at the webcam to underline his amazement at the ease with which Infinitum was made. Not that the novelty of this production fazed him whatsoever. “I was probably too busy reading my lines,” he says. “I can’t remember if I learned them or not.”
It’s a far cry from his own first steps into acting at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre in 1961 where he spent the year performing 20 plays that spanned everything from the Bard to Dickens and Agatha Christie. “After I’d done my 44 weeks came the most exciting day of my life,” he says. “They [actors’ union Equity] sent me my card, which then meant, as a full member, I could work on television and film or in London. Now if you’re not working, you can still make a film for nothing.”
It would be another four decades until Sir Ian truly found global fame, first as supervillain Magneto in 2000’s X-Men and then most iconically of all as Gandalf a year later in The Fellowship Of The Ring. It’s a role that’s never really left him, both figuratively when he returned to the part again for The Hobbit trilogy and literally when he and the rest of the original LOTR cast all tattooed themselves with the word “nine” in Elvish. Such is the bond between the group McKellen is set to reunite with them once again next month for a screening of the series in aid of struggling cinemas. To hear him tell the tale of how he was cast by Peter Jackson, the whole thing was just a happy accident.
“I still don’t quite know how Gandalf came my way,” he says. “I think because some of the actors who would have been offered it before me were rather put off by the idea of having to live in New Zealand for a year. ‘Where the hell is that?’ Well, more fool them.”
Of course, back in the early 2000s Twitter hadn’t been invented, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was but a twinkle in Kevin Feige’s eyes and fan culture was confined to the odd message board and convention. So McKellen had the now impossible luxury of not quite understanding the scale of the franchise he was getting himself into. “I realised the popularity of the books not because I had read them, but I just got so many messages from people who were desperately worried that they were going to see the characters exactly as they had imagined.”
Sure enough, once The Fellowship Of The Ring was showered in critical acclaim and took a $887.8 million worldwide haul at the box office, any illusions as to Lord Of The Rings’ monumental appeal were swiftly shattered. As were the reservations of any fans who’d wondered as to his suitability. “I can’t count the number of people who said to me, ‘Your Gandalf was exactly as I’d always imagined him,’” he says. “Well, how could that be? Because my Gandalf to look at is nothing like the Gandalf described in the books.”
In case you hadn’t picked up the running theme already, self-deprecation is a totemic feature of the McKellen charm offensive. His most recent and wildly entertaining speech to the Oxford Union begins with a list of “facts” about him from the internet including such choice cuts as “next James Bond”, “sexiest actor alive” and “died last week”. When mentioning his upcoming role as Hamlet – a character generally thought to be 30 years old at the play’s beginning – McKellen says, “I’m not looking at your screen in case you burst out laughing.”
Lest you think McKellen protests too much, there’s a good reason why his powers of persuasion are so well-honed. As cofounder of the Stonewall charity and an activist for LGBTQ+ rights, he’s had to twist the arm of many a prime minister and public figurehead for greater equality. He even cajoled Nelson Mandela in the right direction when the former South African president was crafting his country’s post-apartheid constitution. What’s particularly striking when you go back and watch some of his debate appearances alongside closed-minded politicians and conservatives is how much and how little has changed in the world.
“I do hear people say, ‘When I was growing up, there were never any transgender people about,’” he says. “Well, there were, you just didn’t notice them. And that was exactly what they used to say about gay people.”
Despite the ongoing struggles for transgender rights in the UK, there’s no doubt as to the progress Stonewall and Sir Ian have helped cultivate for diversity and inclusion. A small but meaningful reminder of that change was Channel 4’s screening of It’s A Sin, the Russell T Davies drama about the Aids crisis of the 1980s and 1990s that he describes as “quite wonderful”. Not least in part to his own surprising connection to the show.
“When Stephen Fry is visiting Mrs Thatcher, he’s coming down a staircase with a stained-glass window. I thought, ‘I know that stained-glass window. That’s my school.’ I’ve been up and down those stairs I don’t know how many times,” he says. “And then the demonstration when they lie down on the floor, that was in Bolton. That was outside my dad’s office in the town hall.”
Asked for his thoughts on Davies’ opinion that only gay actors should play gay roles, he’s not quite as strident. “It’s complicated, but I wouldn’t want to say to any actor you can’t because of what you are,” he says. “Some people like Derek Jarman, the openly gay filmmaker, assumed I would begin to identify myself as a queer artist and only do material that was relevant to my sexuality. I thought, ‘That means I can’t play Macbeth or Hamlet and King Lear.’”
Even with this response, you get a sense of how McKellen is always on the lookout for the next thing. Such is the way for a man who celebrated his 80th birthday with a one-man show that spanned 86 venues across the UK, and so it was with Infinitum when he discovered his friend Conleth Hill (AKA Game Of Thrones’ Varys) had already snagged himself a role. “When we chatted to Ian about it he said, ‘Well, Conleth is doing it. Is there a part for me?’” says Matthew Butler-Hart. “So we were like, ‘There is now. Absolutely.’”
Far be it from us to jinx things, but it doesn’t feel like this “enforced retirement” business is going to stick.
Infinitum: Subject Unknown is available to stream on demand from 22 March, £7.99. apple.com
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