Few actors working together fit the title of “national treasure” quite like Sir Ian McKellen. Ask anyone you encounter for their feelings on the six-time Olivier winner, and the chances are they’ll point you to at least one of his virtues, whether that be his celebrated charity work, his decades-long campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights, his famously tireless work ethic or his Oscar-nominated performance as one of 21st century cinema’s all-round good guys as Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings movies.
It might interest you to hear, then, that the man himself has always been more attracted to the dark side – at least when it comes to choosing his roles.
“Richard III, Iago, Macbeth – the bad guys usually have the best tunes, you know?” he tells HuffPost UK.
“There are not many wonderful ‘good’ parts, although I was lucky enough to play one of them.
“Gandalf’s good, through and through – but strong with it. But on the whole, you want to play the baddies. The devil has the best lines.”
In that case, Sir Ian is well and truly in his element in his new film The Critic, playing Jimmy Irskine, a merciless and self-involved theatre pundit who’s never happier than when he’s issuing one of his dreaded takedowns.
When Jimmy’s long-held position at the paper where he’s worked for decades looks in doubt, he employs his most manipulative and ruthless tactics to hold onto it – no matter what or who stands in his way.
“What I basically enjoy about acting is not being myself,” he says with a laugh. “That’s what I enjoy, and that’s how I judge myself. ‘Would I be able to get inside this person that doesn’t feel like me?’
“And then you discover, of course, that you’ve got some things in common with whoever you play, however horrible they may be. I can imagine what it’s like to behave badly, although I try not to behave badly in real life.”
He says it was “easy enough” to get into character as Jimmy, not just because of the critics he’s encountered in his own life, from whom he could draw inspiration, but also, Sir Ian he puts it: “He’s gay, for one thing, which I am too”.
At several points, the veteran performer is keen to reiterate that The Critic “shouldn’t be categorised as a gay movie” (“That sounds as if there’s some sort of agenda on behalf of the production to proselytise,” he claims. “We’re just telling a good yarn, but a believable yarn.”) Still, he concedes that Jimmy’s sexuality is “relevant to the story” being told, not least because the film is set at a time when homosexuality was not just looked down upon but illegal in the UK.
“In the 1930s to be gay in London was not an easy thing,” the actor says. “You would have been [living] a life of deceit and disguise.”
“If this film had been made in the 1930s… well, it couldn’t have been made, really,” Sir Ian remarks. “It would have been too outrageous! Jimmy’s behaviour could not have been filmed.”
Indeed, despite Sir Ian’s insistence The Critic is “on the whole, just a really entertaining 90 minutes”, the film is quite radical in many ways, not least because despite the character’s advancing years, we still see Jimmy enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle, engaging in anonymous public sex, unapologetically enjoying all-nighters with his close circle and winding up law enforcement when given the opportunity.
The film also doesn’t shy away from the role which the state and law enforcement played in the oppression of queer people during this time before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and nor does its star during our interview.
The time period of The Critic, Sir Ian points out, was one in which gay people “were being bullied by the state”.
“I think that all scars Jimmy’s spirit,” he shares. “So, when he thinks he needs to defend himself, to hold onto the job that he loves so much, he does it in a bullying fashion, which reflects the spirit with which the laws of the land have been bullying him.”
“It’s a story with depth, and if there’s a moral that people learn from it, all the better,” he continues, noting: “It’s important that we get it right, and I think we do.”
For modern viewers, The Critic also serves as a reminder that rights enjoyed by the LGBTQ+ community today are still relatively new, and the landscape for queer people even a few decades ago was markedly different.
“When I visited schools, talking about what it used to be like when I was at school, it’s important that people understand how much things have improved and how much more understanding and friendly we are to each other than the law used to allow us to be,” Sir Ian explains.
As Sir Ian agrees, “the fight goes on” for equality for all LGBTQ+ people, both here and overseas, with many critics pointing out that arguments once employed against gay and bisexual people are being used today in debates around the transgender community.
On the whole, Sir Ian says this is a subject he doesn’t “feel competent to talk about”, admitting: “I’ve only ever really talked in public about the two things about which I am an expert – A, being gay, and B, being an actor. Anything beyond that, I’m on rather wobbly ground.”
Still, the comparison, he says, is a “very acute” one.
“When we were fighting to get the laws changed in this country, a lot of the opposition to change came from people who simply didn’t believe that there was a problem,” he recalls. “‘I don’t know any queers’, ‘I don’t want my son to grow up a Nancy boy’, ‘he will be if he meets other queers’... no he won’t! That’s not how it works. The idea that you could talk someone into being gay when they didn’t already have that in their nature all seemed to me stupid.”
“You hear now, ‘well, I don’t know any trans people, they don’t really exist, it’s not really a problem’,” he continues. “And probably, we’re in kind of a transition where people understand there is – for some people – a problem. And it’s a terrible problem, and they need as much help as possible.
“The nature of that help can be debated, but it does remind me that when society disregards a minority – and, worse than that, imposes laws and restrictions on their behaviour, which is really unfair – then that’s when society is going off the rails, and we have to attend to it.”
The fight for LGBTQ+ rights is one with which Sir Ian has been synonymous for decades. His work has included supporting various causes and groups relating to the community and co-founding the charity and advocacy group Stonewall.
Still, the actor is surprisingly modest when it comes to his own contributions to progress, insisting he’s “never been in the vanguard of change”.
Instead, he claims, his role has “really been supporting others who understood how to make change happen”.
“But I’m aware, because people tell me, that it was helpful to them in their own journey to read about, and be aware of, people like me and Michael Cashman and Stephen Fry, and so many others,” he says.
“We’re all connected aren’t we? One of the wonderful things about coming out was not just that one’s life changes totally for the better – because you’re being honest, at last, with yourself and with other people – but that you make connections with other people who have been through the same problems as you have yourself. And not just in this country – far away. So, to bear witness just by saying that you’re gay can be a wonderful help to people.”
Of his own coming out in 1988, Sir Ian claims: “I just did what I did, and discovered in being honest about myself that I was then connected to lots of other people. My contribution was simply to be myself.”
As for that “national treasure” status, Sir Ian is even unsure about how deserved that is (even if he’s seemingly one of only a few who thinks so).
“If you’re in public life then you have a persona, perhaps, that’s out of your control, it’s all other people’s perception of you,” he says.
“And when people, as they sometimes do, praise me for the effect I’ve had on their own lives… well that wasn’t me, really. That was probably Gandalf, you know?”
The Critic is in cinemas now.