Ian McKellen on playing an ageing Sherlock in Mr Holmes
“When I was a young man, people would ask how I remembered my lines, and I’d think ‘That’s the easy part!’ Well, these days it’s one of the problems. I do find myself thinking ‘How am I going to remember it?’”
McKellen recently went to see Julian Clary perform in London. Leaving the theatre, he found he could hardly move in the late-night crush of Piccadilly Circus. He loved it, he says. Although he now stars on TV in the comedy Vicious, he says he doesn’t get recognised so often that life becomes difficult. When he is noticed, people are sweet. He thinks they might be wary of him because of his roles as Gandalf and Magneto, the super-villain he plays in the X-Men movies. I wonder if it’s because, for all his good manners, he doesn’t seem to crave the love of strangers as much as many actors.
“Well, I don’t. I’ve spent my life wanting people to come and see me in Shakespeare, because if they do he’ll enrich their lives. It’s not about being famous. In fact, I’m nervous about pretending I’m more interesting than anyone else.”
He would be doomed, he says, on Big Brother. “I would be bound to be thrown out because I’m so boring. Other people are wonderful projectors of the life force purely as themselves, but I’m not. I don’t want to draw attention to myself as I am.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGDXnr8YXZg
His body language has grown cagier on cue, his arms and legs both crossed. “I don’t really like doing interviews,” he says. I can tell, I reply, and he sniggers. “I just find it uncomfortable. We become actors so we don’t have to be ourselves!”
There are things he feels expert in: acting and the campaign for gay rights. “With those, I’m confident that I’ve got something worth saying that people might be interested in. But politics, or art, or this, that or t’other? My opinions are no more or less special than anyone else’s. Why would they be? I don’t get it. Never have.”
He unwinds a little from the chair discussing the recent vote to legalise gay marriage in Ireland – “It will reverberate” – and the schools he visits, where kids are now taught not “to mock others for what they can’t change”. I say he seems optimistic, and he says you have to be, don’t you? “What I’ve learned at 76,” he says, “is that we live in a world that’s always changing. But some of those changes aren’t altogether unhelpful.”
Mr Holmes is in cinemas now
