Ian McKellen Swings from Shakespeare to Gandalf to Virtual Reality
How eerie: when you put on a headset to watch the film “An Ark,” at the Shed, you behold ghostly, real-seeming 3-D images, similar to holograms, of four actors, including Sir Ian McKellen. But, if you saw “An Ark” on a recent Tuesday, you might have noticed that one of the other headset-wearers in the audience was the flesh-and-blood McKellen, who was watching the film for the first time.
Before McKellen could deliver his critique of the show, he had to face a gantlet of schoolkids in the audience, who knew the eighty-six-year-old actor not from his turns as Lear but as Gandalf and Magneto. One boy wondered why the actors in “An Ark” had talked so much about death; McKellen, dressed in a capacious wool sweater and squashy orange sneakers, told him, “We’re angels, really.” He patiently answered another child’s question—“Have you ever thought of being a comedy actor?”—by saying, “Have a look at ‘Extras,’ with Ricky Gervais.”
Moments later, McKellen was in a conference room, where he surveilled a tray of snacks. Selecting a bag of potato chips, he enthusiastically read aloud the word “Classic” from the package and commenced gobbling. “An Ark” was so lifelike that he had instinctively reached out his hand when one of the characters had encouraged the audience to touch her; still, he said,“it is with a sigh of relief that I say that this medium is not going to overtake the theatre as an art form.” He had tangled with technology in the early days of filming the C.G.I.-heavy “Lord of the Rings,” in 1999 and 2000: in one scene, tasked with interacting with a group of other actors represented only by their photographs, McKellen had mumbled, “This isn’t why I became an actor,” and then he wrote a letter to the film’s director, Peter Jackson, offering to quit. “I couldn’t do that scene,” he said. “I don’t think any actor could. So we found some other way to do it.”
The ruminative quality of “An Ark,” which is written in the second person and chronicles “your” journey from birth to afterlife, is consonant with McKellen’s own outlook. “It’s a fascination with, or an acceptance of, the fact that I am not immortal,” he said. “It’ll be my turn soon.” He had previously wanted his funeral to close with the song “One Singular Sensation,” from “A Chorus Line”; those plans changed after he bequeathed his body to science.
McKellen had a brush with mortality in 2024, while playing Falstaff in London: he fell off the stage. “I shrieked out to a full house in the Noël Coward Theatre, ‘I’m sorry! I don’t do this!,’ and then, ‘Help me, I’m dying!’ ” he said. “Those are the thoughts that went through my head.” McKellen and the audience member he fell on were both rushed to the hospital; McKellen suffered chipped vertebrae and a fractured wrist. “But I’ve tested myself since—I did five films last year and I’ve been onstage now five times since, and everything’s working,” he said. “The Christophers,” a film about art forgery that he made with Steven Soderbergh, comes out in April, and he’ll soon play Jacob Marley opposite Johnny Depp in a film about Ebenezer Scrooge.
The day after McKellen saw “An Ark,” he went on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show and recited, from the Elizabethan play “Sir Thomas More,” a monologue lambasting anti-immigrant sentiment. The four-minute clip went viral. He is as beloved by many for his gay-rights activism as he is for his mastery of Shakespeare, but he wears that tiara lightly. “I did it on my own behalf,” he said about coming out, in 1988, at the age of forty-nine. “Nobody was surprised. Simon Callow, who was the first English actor of any note to come out before me, had to come out in a biography, because whenever he talked about it, the press wouldn’t report it.” McKellen said that he has experienced no disadvantages to publicly acknowledging his homosexuality. “And it freed up my emotions to no end. I’d always found strongly emotional scenes very difficult,” he said. “I was playing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and suddenly I could cry at every performance. That was all because I was honest. Everything was better. And life was much more fun, going around saying, ‘I’m gaaaaaay!’ I used to think it would be fun to have a coming-out campaign like Billy Graham—that Elton and I and the Pet Shop Boys and whoever else wanted to, we’d get a big tent and when we arrived in your town we’d announce, ‘Now is your chance! You can stand up and come out!’ ”
McKellen smiled and put the almost empty bag on the table: “I used to think my gravestone would read, ‘Here lies Gandalf. He came out.’ ” ♦