‘If a camera had drooled over a woman’s body the way it drools over Fraser’s, there would have been protests!’
Evening Standard, 10 March 1999
A career in films still eluded McKellen until the late 1990s when his sixtieth birthday approached. Richard III aside, there was, in spite of middling-to-good roles in Cold Comfort Farm, Restoration, And the Band Played On and other films, still nothing truly remarkable to be discerned except an apprentice film actor keen to improve his skills.
In 1995 the Hollywood director Bryan Singer, a New York orphan raised in a Jewish household, and a critically trained cinema director at the University of South California, had seen the advances made by McKellen’s modern Richard III, portrayed as the crypto Nazi-fascist. He was impressed. A second stab was in the offing for Singer to make Stephen King’s novella Apt Pupil. Singer called Apt Pupil ‘a very dark subject matter and it was something that came from passion’. Set in the 1980s in California, a high-school student called Todd Bowden finds a Nazi war criminal living near him under the pseudonym Kurt Dussander. Obsessed as he is with Nazism and the Holocaust, he engages Dussander to share stories in a downward-spiralling study in cruelty. Seeing McKellen play the old man Amos Stark-adder in John Schlesinger’s Cold Comfort Farm as a convincing crypto-Nazi, Singer overcame his first objection to Ian as the forty-five-year-old Dussander, for originally he had a German in mind. Said Ian, ‘I felt if I could combine his complexity, his colourfulness, to the stoic German character it would create a character that, although evil, would garner more sympathy and would be more enjoyable for the audience to watch.’
He brought, as well, a chilling plausibility, an enriching over-lay of old-man mannerisms with shades of the earlier Justice Shallow. Critics detected a gay subtext in Apt Pupil, as well as finding unconvincing the central plot that the fourteen-year-old pupil should succeed in finding Dussander when nationwide Nazi hunting had failed. Ian’s sympathetic portrayal was criticised for blurring the morality of the message, in what Caroline Picart and David Frank described as a dangerous ‘subterranean way’.
At a coarser level, in Apt Pupil ambiguity pervaded the mutual manipulation. ‘You’re fucking me,’ says Todd, to which Dussander answers, ‘We’re fucking each other.’ On his role as Dussander, McKellen commented, ‘I concentrated not on the man who did monstrous things, but the man who did perfectly ordinary things, like go shopping in southern California in a polyester suit.’ The film cost fourteen million and earned only nine.
Rumours and even allegations, dismissed in lawsuits, aligned Bryan Singer to the less savoury aspects of Hollywood life. A shower sequence which included naked fourteen-to seventeen-year-old college students engendered a civil suit by one of the extras, alleging the film bullied and harassed them into stripping naked, but the lawsuit was dropped. Ian never mentioned that anything untoward was going on, if such it had. (With the scandals and allegations centring on Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey in late 2017, new accusations of sexual misconduct, added to the old, were levelled against Singer, including one of rape, while he was directing Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of Freddie Mercury. The University of Southern California, to whom he donated five million dollars, repudiated his patronage. In 2019 his name was removed from the film’s BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film.)
There was a certain brazen naivety about McKellen’s quite nakedly stated ambition to win an Oscar with the next Hollywood film of his to be released just after Apt Pupil in 1998. Simon Callow pointed out to me in 2018 that McKellen had gone ‘to hang out in Hollywood in the late 1980s for six months, just playing small parts and learning how the system works. Then he hit gold.’ Callow had a novel with him when they had supper one day in 1998 and said, ‘I really want to make this into a film.’ ‘I’ve just made it,’ said McKellen.
This was Gods and Monsters, added Callow, a ‘brilliant imagining’ of the circumstances of the death of the director James Whale. My own response on a recent viewing was more muted. I found it sometimes slow-moving, even desultory in its account of the erstwhile Frankenstein‘s director’s last days. Forced to retire because of a homosexual scandal, he committed suicide by drowning himself in his own swimming pool. There is an element of Death in Venice romanticism in Whale’s sexual fixation on his hunky young gardener. ‘Excuse me, are you famous?’ ‘I had my time in the sun,’ is the measured McKellen/Whale reply. Ian empathises deeply and is well immersed in the self-regarding hero’s soul during the very short twenty-four days of shooting, as he deconstructs his prey’s shaky heterosexuality by undermining faith in his rigid conformism. The filming lingers on McKellen licking his lips while tempting the gardener to reveal his naked body, which might suggest self-indulgence. But it is more than this, as McKellen conveys feelingly Whale’s anguish as the gay Englishman who suffered trauma in the First World War trenches, and then fell in love with California. By turns he is self-pitying, blatantly manipulative, wittily detached and funny, switching to quivering fury while pinpointing all the variations on Whale’s sexuality.
It won rapturous plaudits for openness and honesty. Critics hailed these strengths. Ian’s presence is always convincing. Above all, for himself, he had mastered the way he had scaled down performance for the intimate eye of the camera.
But to what end? What exactly was the point of showing this poor old man’s demoralised narcissism (caught between sexual desire and self-pity), as he lived out his fantasy? The point perhaps lay in that controlled display of Whale’s sexual appetite, Ian believing he could carry it to the highest realm of winning an Oscar. The glittering-prize aspiration was much evident. His knighthood made him an instant target for US interviewers wherever he went, but in one article that promoted Nick Nolte’s claims to win the Oscar for Best Actor, he worked off his anger at the rigging:
‘Now, my people are going to have to get something placed about me to counter it,’ said the rival nominee slightly with tongue-in-cheek, like a weary Godfather arranging a retaliatory hit, except this don was wearing leather trousers. ‘This, I am afraid, is how it works.’
McKellen flew to New York like a political candidate to campaign for his Oscar. He appeared on Good Morning America (agenda-setting), David Letterman (jokey), the Charlie Rose Show on PBS (intellectual, supposedly), the Daily Show on Comedy Central (hip) and several Academy Award specials. He was now considered to be in pole position. Andrew Billen wrote in the Evening Standard, ‘Everyone likes prizes but I had presumed McKellen would not let his liking show so obviously. He is a Serious Classical Actor, a refined voice in the cause of gay liberation and certainly no ambitious ingénue, indeed, part of his belated cinematic success may be due to the screen’s liking for the particular puckers of his fifty-nine-year old face.’
‘I think it is rather the reverse,’ McKellen countered. ‘People think differently about me. I’m usually known by the press outside England as Ian McKellen the stage actor or Ian McKellen the Shakespearean actor, or of late, worryingly, Ian McKellen the veteran actor. But now I think, for a few months at least, I will perhaps be labelled a movie actor as well.’
Here, McKellen was delivering a first, for previous gay actors who had won Oscars, such as Charles Laughton for The Private Life of Henry VIII, going back to the 1930s, a different time, had not made their sexuality an integral part of their public personality. Here he was, proclaiming public victimhood, and even saying beforehand that he would not get an Oscar because he was gay. Who could not then approve of his making this film? His life was an open book, later shown to the world on his accessible website. He had not had a steady partner for ten years and was apparently living a celibate life. A reporter in Hollywood listed his rivals, putting the question – could he, as the first openly gay actor, win? ‘There’s Edward Norton, up for best actor for his performance in American History X, telling me yesterday he wouldn’t have gone into acting if he hadn’t seen Ian McKellen, fellow Best Actor nominee for Gods and Monsters, on a school trip to the theatre.’
Ian took Sean along with him to the ceremony, still the leading light in his court of supporters. Delighted as he had been with the nomination, Ian could not get over his anger and disappointment when he failed to win, and Roberto Benigni won the Oscar for Life is Beautiful. He, Mathias and friends withdrew to lick their wounds, shut themselves away after the ceremony, and refused to talk to the press. Even the promoters of Gods and Monsters were against him winning the Oscar, he claimed: he had been forced to lose the opportunity to denounce homophobia in the movie business (speech already written and committed to memory). Aghast at the prospect of an Ian rant, the promoters were keen to play down the theme, and they dropped Stonewall as the beneficiary of the film’s London premiere.
Redirected aggression and anger, or transference (even scapegoating) might be explained as McKellen’s next very public move after the Hollywood fiasco. Or just being a chameleon actor? Pleading a return to his old socialist principles and his forebears who were preachers, missionaries and pacifists, he turned his back on London and the National Theatre, proclaiming, ‘I’m going back to rep with local audiences and a community of actors … it is possible I may not be seen on the London stage again.’
This emotional reaction came from his own sense of rejection; maybe, if we see theatre as McKellen’s family, it was like turning against your spouse or the person closest to you. It took the form of asserting his strongly puritan as well as his humble side. His grandparents, we should bear in mind, came home from their honeymoon and got down on their knees on the bare flagstones in the kitchen to ask God to bless the house.
The West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, where he now set up his rival camp-in-exile, was hardly a backwater, and there was not going to be any Long March of Chairman Mao to return to power. Richard Eyre shook his head in dismay: he thought it was fantastically sentimental. How could McKellen imagine the Leeds bourgeoisie was hugely different from the London bourgeoisie? Why did he have to dump on London in order to justify his emigration? Was it such a massive act of martyrdom to go to Leeds? Peter Hall was more blunt – and entirely prophetic: ‘[The media] knows, he knows, and I know that he will not appear on the London stage again until he appears on the London stage again.’ McKellen arrived in Leeds in September 1998 and appeared in The Seagull, Present Laughter and The Tempest, leaving at the end of the following February.
Subtly, by stealth, a new form of ‘artistic licence’ had come to be accepted in the visual-dominated world. This licence, which always had an imposing, often riveting, picture to go with it (and McKellen’s sixty-year-old face was now richly weathered with the particular puckers for all seasons) could now be deemed ‘luvvie licence’ or ‘celebrity speak’ or even ‘limelight lying’. People in the public eye could, for outrage or reaction, or because they craved continual attention, say just about anything, as long as it conformed to the soundbite, and the known, often narrow, narrative of their lives. (An opposite tactic to cope with avid press interest was Michael Gambon’s. He avoided interviews or refused to take them seriously. ‘You will gather,’ wrote a Guardian journalist in 2004, ‘Sir Michael Gambon is not invariably and entirely truthful.’)
Even so, there was a new inner uncertainty the many-sided McKellen suffered. Amanda Mitchison in The Times lifted the lid on this, exploring the positive tetchiness of Serena. When he came in to see her in a break from rehearsal in Leeds, where he was to open in The Seagull (and playing Dr Dorn, a minor role), she found him a lithe figure in dark green shirt and black leather trousers who restlessly, while sitting opposite her, curled up with legs under him, stretched out, perched forward, rocked backwards and forwards on the back legs of the chair. The hands were restless too – passing through his hair, stroking the table in front, or cupped over his knees. The labile face – in his paroxysm of discontent and power play in the eyes with a glittering stare – gave way to bored, sulky lowering to the room’s corner, chin up, eyes half shut, as if spoiling for a row. And then there was the dazzling smile to wash over and win the journalist. ‘Asked the obvious questions he fixed a bored gaze on the radiator … Then his limbs spread out under the table like a starfish.’
McKellen was unhappy and Mitchison caught his bitter mood. He regretted playing old men in Apt Pupil and Gods and Monsters. ‘I have always had a line in old men. I have always been interested in the physicality of acting all the way through the body, the feet, the hands, everything. So, the body giving way and not responding the way it used to is interesting. But I would love to act a character in his prime … a script came through the other day and the character was a hundred and two.’ He could now vindicate his explosive moods and temper, even though these were rare – since ‘coming out’, of course – claiming in principle that he was much more in touch with his temper. ‘I’m a very phlegmatic person. I find it very difficult to be angry. Until I came out, I saw somebody else’s point of view, even if I thought in the greater scheme of things they were misguided. They had their reasons.’ Yet he would still claim, ‘Now I am a little more confident of where I stand, less tolerant than I used to be.’
One is by now wary of such self-pronouncements – and so was Mitchison, who saw just about all he said as ‘touchy, chippy, self-conscious actorliness’. She bravely quoted The Seagull at him as a comparison, when Trigorin, the famous writer, wallows in self-pity and confesses, ‘I feel tetchy and worthless … I’ll never be anything more than charming and talented. And when I’m dead it’ll say on my gravestone, “Here lies Trigorin. He was good – but not as good as Turgenev.”‘
But McKellen ignored this, escaping into an intense rendition of some of Dr Dorn. Once an actor … He flipped to the other side of the coin, pronouncing himself happy with some aspects of Leeds because it was the first time his theatre ever pulled an audience out of the local pubs. When they advertised Shakers, John Godber and Jane Thornton’s play about cocktail waitresses, with a poster of thighs and suspenders, ‘Every time one of the characters said “f***” the building shook with laughter.’
As Hall had prophesied, soon after winning acclaim as Prospero and appearing as Dorn, and in Present Laughter, he was back in New York at the Broadhurst, and at London’s Lyric Theatre, in Strindberg’s Dance of Death. The age he lived in adored the celebrity actor McKellen, while all he did and said kept his openness forever in the public eye. Already something else was in the air, and a great transformative moment in McKellen’s life and career powered, even hurtled, its way towards him.
First and foremost McKellen is known the world over and owes his exceptional fame to his roles in the X-Men films and The Lord of the Rings, while all media attention, in whatever form it takes, kicks off with mention of Magneto and Gandalf. The resounding overture or run-up to playing Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings was the first X-Men film in 2000, in which he plays Magneto.
The X-Men are a small group of mutants with superhuman powers taking various forms, which put them at odds with normal humans. The tension in the films lies between those who want to live peaceably among humans and those who want to destroy them. Their mutations had been caused by radiation from atomic blasts. (Originally Magneto’s mutation was caused by the circuitry of an electro-magnetic power, and he is the mutant controller of the world’s electrical power.) Two of them, Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Rogue (Anna Paquin), spark off the warring conflict between opposite approaches to the acceptance of mutant kind: peaceful co-existence, as the amiable, godlike yet wheelchair-bound Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) advocates, or the militant Brotherhood of Mutants, led by Magneto (McKellen), which fights for survival and domination. Xavier, founder of a school for mutants, is the authority on genetic mutation and a mind-reader. At first an accomplice, friend and fellow conspirator and then an enemy to Magneto, he was the first to be cast, as Stewart’s success as Captain Picard in Star Trek had catapulted him into fame after two decades as a leading Royal Shakespeare Company player. Their scenes together of verbal jousting are the best in the film.
McKellen in his documentary Playing the Part (2017) says he felt he’d found complete success after winning a Tony award, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild award, and an Oscar lead actor nomination for his performance in 1998’s Gods and Monsters – the first in decades for an openly gay actor. A quick perusal of the Marvel comics, however, caught his fancy.
McKellen’s first impression was that he wouldn’t be good as Magneto, for: ‘If you look at the comics, Magneto is usually drawn from a low vantage point, his legs wide apart, a superhuman body of muscles and power … then there’s me, Ian McKellen.’ He asked the production team to come up with a false muscle suit to beef up his thighs, calves and pecs a bit because ‘becoming a cartoon character isn’t easy,’ he said. But what excited McKellen finally to embody Magneto was the inner character of the superhero: he was very unusual, the exception to the rule when it came to superheroes. ‘These stories mean something, and that’s what separates X-Men from the other comics. Superman, the Hulk, Spider-Man, even James Bond, they’re all the same people – wimps who change out of clothes and become superheroes, discovering their inner light. That’s not Magneto. He’s political, a warrior, clear-sighted, pained, anguished, determined.’
He also saw Xavier and Magneto as related to his activism. Both wanted a world where they existed without fear, and while McKellen considered Xavier as the gentler, caring Martin Luther King Jr, he aligned Magneto with Malcolm X, ready to fight to the bitter end. The Fox film company, too, when the idea was first submitted to them, responded favourably because it took seriously the comparison between the pair. Further historical relevance came from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity ending the persecution of early Christians; this analogy was underlined in a deleted scene in which the character of Storm teaches history. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting of communists was also brought into the mix.
After being in development for over fifteen years, with a final budget of $75 million and Bryan Singer as director, filming – mainly in Toronto – began in late September 1999, continuing until early March 2000.
Magneto was a startling departure from McKellen’s work in the theatre, and not in any way a study of complex human behaviour or personality. X-Men established psychology and types of character briefly and effectively, but not in any depth. The sense of depth comes from suggestion or suggestibility picked up by the viewer.
The dialogue is very simple: one sentence line, with monosyllables. The mutants have allegorical names like medieval mystery play characters, such as Rogue, Storm, Mystique, Dazzler, Angel. ‘Our cause will be theirs,’ they say. They are jealous, angry, violent, intellectually aware of causes and preaching. The point made over and again is that the mutants ‘are incapable of human contact’, although they would like it. The hands stagger and repel as a pretty non-mutant woman tries to touch and embrace Logan’s face. They could be disguised homosexuals in an allegorical tale, alienated from society, or they could equally be Conservative politicians sent away to boarding school at the age of seven, emotionally cold and unable to make contact with ordinary feelings and people. Brian Cox, who was in X-Men 2, the sequel, found Bryan Singer ‘one of the most gifted directors I’ve come across’, but that he was somewhat confused in the way he handled actors. One evening in Vancouver he telephoned Cox saying, ‘There was a hell-to-do today. Just as well you were not there!’
Singer had taken painkillers and lost the plot, gone ballistic, summoned the cast and lambasted everyone, especially Patrick Stewart whose career, Singer boasted, had enjoyed a new lease of life from X-Men, having insulted him earlier as a Star Trek hack. Ian, says Cox, kept out of it, having ‘an instinct for avoiding trouble’.
The X-Men films introduced Ian to a whole new generation of actors who appeared with him. When he was filming in Canada in 2002, Ian told one, Alan Cumming, who was gay, that he wanted to visit Vancouver’s nudist Wreck Beach.
‘These girls came up and said, “Are you Ian McKellen?” and they gave him a big thumbs-up.’ Cumming was on Graham Norton’s chat show transmitted in North America when he mentioned this. Next day, Cumming’s phone rang and when he heard McKellen’s voice he went, ‘Shit.’ It was like, ‘Oh, hi, Ian, are you in town?’
McKellen replied, ‘Yes, darling. I was watching television last night. I saw you talking about my penis…’ So this was a glimpse of time off from the world of mutants: ‘Booming along Wreck Beach with a male companion, biting into a hot dog and letting it all hang out.’
In X-Men, Ian’s face is revealed in its craggy ordinariness, and his strikingly and upright camp posture is pitted against Stewart’s sedentary powers to provide riveting verbal and visual interchange. There’s much vulnerability of human flesh in the violence: appealing, lively faces, naked chests, or forearms, wrists, hands, feet: it’s pure fantasy, with all the visceral thrills, if such they are, of Casualty. The character of Mystique (Rebecca Romijn, the flexible, sinuous female, a sexy blue, nude number suggesting fish scales) adds a Dior chic to the proceedings. The defence might be made that it is all rather a hotch-potch: but no one dies. After all, they are comic-strip characters; they have to go on living till next week, and fighting one another to establish who is top mutant when they are not fighting normal humans.
Destroying ‘normal’ humanity is the aim of the Mutant Brotherhood. Magneto preaches, for example: ‘In 1949 … America used to be the land of tolerance, peace, etc.…’ and now we have Bush, it is implied. Where have ‘the snows of yesteryear’ gone? Ian and Patrick have both claimed the importance of the historic parallels and political commitment of X-Men. ‘The producers considered it is an allegory, that is, to raise money first of all for black civil rights in America. But I rather linked it to the struggle for gay rights,’ Ian told David Thompson, who was making a film about him, ‘that each civil rights movement splits between the integrationists and the separatists, the proponents of non-violence versus violent activism (Malcolm X). Any member of a minority facing discrimination can relate to the mutants’ dilemma.’
Ian claimed that ‘Shakespeare’s heroes were thinkers and so is Magneto. When Mystique asks me, “Are you a god?” I answer, “Bringer of light, wisdom and understanding.” But one danger of allegory is that it can so easily become self-important posturing; indeed it may be better to convey a political message not with allegory but with direct documentary. Magneto is a pure narcissist, or so Ian plays him, aware of power, self-satisfied, without self-doubt. He is such a contrast to Gandalf, whom McKellen was to play next, and who is not an allegory for anything, but always himself, full of self-doubt and questioning wisdom. The central character, or characters, in a great story is just a great character, like Badger in The Wind in the Willows. I counted how many times the word ‘power’ is used in the first film: dozens. The mutants want power to the degree that they are obsessed by it, either to protect themselves from destruction, or to control and destroy others.
There is much to engage the audience in X-Men, such as the startling exchanges between McKellen and Stewart, and Xavier’s school for mutants is intriguing. It is there they learn ‘Anonymity is the first defence against the world.’ Ian and Patrick are always mesmerising in their rapport, but I found Logan (the central character, meant to be ‘Everyman’) two-dimensional and frankly a bore. Likewise, the endless fighting and aleatory bodies, with their mutating flesh splitting up, transforming or disowning itself, are repetitive and off-putting. X-Men‘s attraction would seem too often to be primarily that of endless permutations of violence, with the liberal, do-gooding element just a veneer.
You could say the heaven/hell dichotomy is a very twenty-first-century axis, and certainly met the approval of the American reviews: ‘Icily commanding McKellen endorsed Magneto’s innate burnished classiness [which] helps in making the plot a cut above comic-book average’ (Denver Post); ‘When [Stuart and McKellen] go golden throat to golden throat, it is like watching members of another species’ (New York Times). The first X-Men earned over $296 million worldwide and was followed by sequels, prequels and spin-offs, giving a new boost to superhero films over the following decades.