When it comes to the career of Ian McKellen, who received two Oscar nominations, one Tony nomination, six Olivier nominations, and earned a reputation as one of the preeminent Shakespearean actors of his generation, critics generally disagree. We have given it the highest level of evaluation. But he can rarely get bruises, so he calls his friends when it happens.
“The best thing to do is just let everyone know that I read the book and don’t worry about it too much,” he says. “I know I’m being punished.”
In his latest role in The Critic, McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, a harsh-tongued theater critic who has a corrosive influence on struggling actress Nina Land, played by Gemma Arterton, to critical acclaim. He is a Mephistophelian figure, someone who has traded his moral compass for a seat in a great orchestra.
The Critic by Alfred Enoch and Ian McKellen
Sean Gleason
“The Devil often has the best songs and the best lines. It’s fun to play an outrageous guy who obviously has emotional issues,” McKellen said in a Zoom interview from his home in London. His gray hair is a bush of indifference, he has an unshaven beard and smokes a chain smoker, but despite his casual appearance, he still looks very elegant. Blessed with a stentorian tone perfectly suited to a classical hero, McKellen’s asides and remarks all come across with depth.
The Critic is set to have its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where producers will likely try to sell the film to studios. If this film ends up getting a deal, McKellen’s performance will have a lot to do with it.
“It was an interesting script, with melodramatic tendencies,” he says. “If the audience doesn’t believe in what we’re doing, they might feel that some of the action is a little over the top. It was a difficult balance to strike.”
As we talked, I noticed that behind him hung a small snapshot of Laurence Olivier in a bowler hat from the movie The Entertainer. “He meant everything to my generation,” McKellen says. “He was a great spirit that has always existed in British theater.”
The scene in The Critic where Erskine talks to Rand about the indescribable quality that actors like Olivier are blessed with: the rare ability to lead characters with contradictions and flaws into brilliant lives. There is. He describes their “ability to evoke the sublime” and attributes it to “the courage to give oneself completely.” McKellen, who over the years has so memorably embodied heroes and villains, great kings and lowly strivers, kind-hearted wizards and mutant lords, is no different. But like Erskine, he struggles to explain how he achieved these changes. He has no formal training, he notes, arriving at the theater via Cambridge, where he majored in literature.
“I never studied Meisner or acting techniques,” McKellen says. “I didn’t go to drama school. I’ve found myself wishing many times that I had a solid approach to how to prepare. Each play or film stands alone to me. And every time, I just start with the fear of, “I’m going to make the same mistake again.”
For McKellen, it all starts with the text. He pores over the script, sketching out the characters’ backstories, hoping to unearth clues about their motivations. Then he begins to think about external factors: the way he moves, the clothes he wears, the intonation of his voice.
McKellen and Brendan Fraser in 1998’s Gods and Monsters
©Lionsgate/Courtesy of Everett Co
“There’s so much work that happens before Ian gets in front of the camera,” says Bill Condon, who directed McKellen on four films, including Gods and Monsters, which earned him an Oscar nomination. “In the beginning, he often sits and talks about the script, and then he starts building from the outside in. Then the conversation becomes all about props and blocks, and he tries to find it more precisely and expressively.” He begins to focus on the powerful, and that’s what unlocks him.”
McKellen relies on a sensitive director to guide him through these inspirations. “I’m very dependent on someone from the outside saying, ‘I’m getting this from you,'” he says. “I define a good director as one who is honest and says, ‘Look, this is barely working.’ But Ian, the moment you decide not to sit down, you’re completely in the character. If you can remember how it felt and how your body was positioned in that moment, you can tap into that feeling. And it starts to spread throughout my DNA. ”
He also spoke candidly about the filmmakers who prevented his muse from appearing. For director Michael Mann’s ill-fated 1983 horror film The Keep, McKellen had to endure hours of makeup to look older. He calls it his worst filmmaking experience.
“Michael Mann said to me, ‘You’re playing this Romanian.’ So we went to Romania to scout and learned how to speak with a Romanian accent. And on the first day of filming, Michael told me, ‘You’re playing this Romanian.’ I asked him to speak with a Chicago accent. Well, I couldn’t do that, so it just got worse from there.”
Most of McKellen’s early career unfolded on stage. It wasn’t until his late 1980s and ’90s that he became passionate about film work, but there’s a reason he got into it so late. He believes that his performance was initially too showy and lacked subtlety.
Two key moments led McKellen to consider performing differently. His first film was a stripped-down version of Macbeth in 1976, under the direction of Trevor Nunn, in which he played a murderous general opposite Judi Dench. The show was performed in the round to an intimate audience of approximately 120 people.
“The joy of it is that you don’t have to project your performance and tell people far away what you’re thinking, because you can see every facial movement,” he says. “They were very close. After that, I never wanted to work in a big theater again where I had to do such showboating.”
The second, and more significant, change occurred in 1988 when McKellen decided to come out as gay. This was a declaration made by Margaret Thatcher’s government to protest a series of laws across the UK banning the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities.
“Almost overnight, everything in my life changed for the better. My relationships with people and my whole attitude towards acting changed,” he says.
Before McKellen made his sexuality public, he preferred to transform himself and play characters. He then drew out more personal connections with certain parts. “The acting that I was good at was all about disguises, like having a weird voice or a weird way of walking,” McKellen says. “It was about lying to the world. It was no longer a situation where I was running alongside a character explaining to the audience. I just became that character.”
McKellen began to notice a difference in his work. For example, if he felt like crying on stage, he noticed that the tears flowed easily immediately after the presentation. He was more emotionally available and more present. And if that change hadn’t happened, he doubts he could have moved on to shooting shots where the camera would expose and zoom in on the wrong notes.
“People who aren’t gay simply don’t understand how damaging it is to lie about who you are and be ashamed of who you are,” McKellen says. “I grew up in a time when it was illegal to have sex with men. And that wasn’t that long ago.”
McKellen and Gemma Arterton in The Critic
Provided by Sean Gleason
In fact, “The Critic” takes place in the 1930s, when Erskine, a homosexual, is arrested by the police for soliciting sex and is at risk of being fired. To keep his job, he resorts to blackmail. McKellen says the secrecy and threat of scandal that Erskine has to endure is pushing him to the dark side.
‘The Critic’ director Anand Thakkar believes that his lead actor’s familiarity with the psychological effects of living in such an intolerant society helped shape his performance. ing. “I don’t buy the idea that you have to be gay to play a gay role,” Tucker says. “But in Ian’s case, he was able to bring a kind of pressing truth to the role from his own lived experience. I had a deep understanding of what it meant.”
It’s a role McKellen wasn’t originally supposed to play. When ‘The Critic’ was first announced, Simon Russell Beale was cast as Erskine. However, production was delayed due to the coronavirus, and Beal was busy with other projects. When I asked Mr. McKellen if it bothered him to be someone’s second choice, he gestured as if to dispel any offensive thoughts.
“I don’t think you were the first choice,” he says, adding that many other actors were offered the role in The Lord of the Rings before being asked to travel to Middle-earth. He pointed out that he had received “Certainly I wasn’t the first choice for Gandalf. Tony Hopkins turned it down, Sean Connery certainly was. I hope you find it ridiculous.”
“The Critic” came at a busy time in McKellen’s professional life. Despite being in his 80s, he is set to star in the unusual film adaptation of Hamlet, playing the role of a young prince, and has just recorded a voice role in Seth MacFarlane’s new film. On stage this year, McKellen is starring in the comedy “Frank and Percy,” which he hopes will be made into a movie. Now in his 90s, Mr. McKellen is constantly reminded of his death, but he says he is hesitant to consider anything as dramatic as his retirement.
“What are you going to do when you retire?” he says incredulously. “I have never taken time off from work, but I know that something could happen at any moment and I would never be able to work again. But as long as my knee holds up and my memory is intact, why continue working?” Shouldn’t I? I feel like I’ve gotten a lot better at this act now.”
That doesn’t mean he’s immune to the rare bad reviews. A critic came to see the film early in a preview of “Frank and Percy” when McKellen said he “didn’t understand the script well enough.” In his review, he accused McKellen of forgetting his lines. “Rather than understanding that things like this happen sometimes, this critic says it’s proof that it’s time for Ian McKellen to quit acting,” he says. “Maybe you’d like this person to discuss it on your podcast.”
McKellen then reconsiders the wisdom of such a move.
“That probably wasn’t the smart thing to do,” he reflects. “It might get more attention. After all, I made my peace with the critics a long time ago.”
