Because everything on The Lord of the Rings was made in New Zealand, so far from Hollywood, from the special effects to the costumes and props, ‘It just felt like such an organic, amazing thing,’ says Liv Tyler. She was with the second unit, but Peter and everyone else were on top of the mountain, and they got stuck in a blizzard. ‘There were all these huge disasters that everybody had to go through, and we all had to be rescued. It was pretty amazing … New Zealand is very beautiful.’ New Zealand gave Ian the chance to pursue his favourite hobby, which was looking at countryside and especially mountains.
Late one night after the day’s filming, he was sitting in a park on a bench when a young man came up to him and sat down. They lit cigarettes. Ian still smoked enthusiastically and gave up, he says, in July 2002, after the main filming was over. Like many of his generation, when seventy-four, he revealed, ‘I had my first cigarette (filched from my father’s jacket in the wardrobe) before I ever drank alcohol or managed an orgasm.’ He points out that Gielgud died at ninety-six after ‘a lifetime of Turkish cigarettes’, although in fact they were liquorice-papered Gauloises noires. ‘Perhaps there’s some special kippering effect on the lungs that saves great actors.’
The young New Zealander’s name was Nick Cuthell; he was a painter or art student, strikingly handsome with long, flowing black locks, and he was intelligent and much liked. Cuthell is a good painter. His painting of Queen Elizabeth II hangs in the New Zealand Parliament.
They hit it off at once. How deep and committed it became on both sides is unclear, and whether or not it was anything more than a platonic attachment remains debatable. Ian claimed later, ‘having brought the twenty-two-year-old back with him’ in early 2001 to London, that he was ‘rewarded with a relationship of a year’s standing’.
Cuthell reaped the kudos and attention of being seen on Ian’s arm. When Ian attended the Academy Awards ceremony and failed, although nominated, to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, ABC Television filmed McKellen holding Nick’s hand. Later, at 3 a.m. in the Veranda Room, Ian was seen joyfully dancing with Nick. Some comments were less kind. ‘McKellen’s arm candy, twenty-two-year-old Nick Cuthell, raised eyebrows when he accompanied the Lord of the Rings star to the Academy Awards ceremony. Alas, according to claims in the US, the relationship is not as solid as it first appeared. For when he is not with Sir Ian, sixty-two, Cuthell is reported to be found in watering holes propositioning women, allegedly telling them that he is only dating McKellen “for the lifestyle.”‘
A ‘toiler for Sir Ian’, i.e. press agent, countered that ‘Nick is in a loving, committed relationship with Ian,’ and scotched reports that Cuthell had admitted having a girlfriend in New Zealand. ‘Women are always throwing themselves at him. Maybe he said that to resist the attention.’
What actually happened between them might be of interest to the prurient, and seized on by the tabloids, but as Ian seemed more ready to be probed by Bryan Appleyard than by any other interviewer, he said frankly almost a year later after he had just ended the Cuthell affair, that Cuthell was his ‘legacy’ of filming in New Zealand. He had met him in the street in New Zealand and ‘brought him back. But that’s unfortunately come to an end. It was another attempt to get in contact with real life. It didn’t continue and there are reasons why it shouldn’t.’
Not for the first time he said he was not unhappy living on his own. ‘I don’t feel a failure. Living on your own is an appropriate thing for a human being to do.’ He claims his work might ‘get in the way of doing something else that is nothing to do with work, which might give me as much satisfaction as work. Maybe something like working at a relationship.’
But then he did have many relationships with lifelong friends so perhaps here he was being unduly harsh on himself. And one happy consequence of his relationship with Cuthell is that much later, when he, Evgeny Lebedev and Sean Mathias bought The Grapes, Ian commissioned the Kiwi artist’s painting of Dickens with the three owners to adorn the front bar.