Ian McKellen: ‘Whenever I fall in love, I wonder: are they going to leave me one day?’
When Gregory Doran asked Ian McKellen to play Falstaff for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 production of Henry IV, he refused. “I told Greg the role was too difficult,” McKellen says, “and I wasn’t sure whether putting on a fat suit would make me feel fat enough on the inside”.
A decade later, he was asked again to take the role, this time by director Robert Icke, for Player Kings, his new adaptation combining the two Henry IV plays. Would he refuse a second time? Fat chance. During a break in rehearsals in South London, I ask if Falstaff is as slippery to nail as McKellen feared he would be.
“Worse,” he huffs. “He’s like something out of The Sopranos – a petty criminal, a Lord of Misrule, a man you wouldn’t let anywhere near your children. He’s far harder to play than Lear or Macbeth.”
Hard? John Falstaff, the incarnation of merrie olde England, who spends most of his time propping up the bar in The Boar’s Head with the errant Prince Hal? “In a Shakespeare soliloquy, the character never lies. But Falstaff always does,” says McKellen. “With Lear and Macbeth, the plays carry the character along. But with Falstaff you are the engine. He also speaks in prose, rather than blank verse, which is why I’m having such difficulty learning the lines.”
The late American critic Harold Bloom argued that Falstaff was “the grandest personality in all of Shakespeare”; McKellen believes that “Bloom was one of the very few people who can understand him”.
McKellen will turn 85 in May. He could be at home in his townhouse by the Thames, basking in the glories of a career filled with legendary stage performances – Macbeth in 1976; Salieri in 1980’s Amadeus; Richard III in 1990. Instead, he’s fretting about Falstaff. Why put himself through it?
“It’s ridiculous isn’t it? After I did Lear again at Chichester, I said, no more Shakespeare. I’m done!” That was in 2017. Then, four years later, he accepted an invitation from the director Sean Mathias (who had been McKellen’s partner throughout the 1980s) to play a strikingly elderly Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor – a production that Mathias has now reimagined for the cinema. “He seemed to think I could do it. So I keep on. Shakespeare is what I’ve been doing for so long now, it confirms I’m still alive.”
McKellen is in remarkable shape, but it’s been a long day and he’s tired. Does he seek solace in these great Shakespearean parts – Lear, Hamlet, Falstaff – each of which, in its own way, confronts mortality?
“Falstaff actually sends his water to the doctor,” he says, laughing. “There aren’t many plays in which a character says ‘Has the doctor looked at my sample yet?’ He knows he is old, that soon he will die. The Henry plays are the great England plays: you get a sense of the country from top to bottom, from monarch to prostitute, from Westminster to Cheapside. But they are also about death. The plays are immortal and I am not. So I hitch a lift on the back.”
McKellen works not for the sake of keeping busy, but because he finds value in it. “If I got stuck in a light comedy on the box, I’d think, ‘God, what’s the point?’ But in the theatre, life is happening now. That’s Falstaff’s first word: ‘Now!’ It’s not reported life, it’s life right there.”
He despairs of Westminster’s cavalier attitude towards the art form. “Theatre is in the fabric of what makes us British. So why isn’t the Government saying it ought to be preserved and encouraged?”
Born in Burnley in 1939, McKellen graduated in 1961 from Cambridge; while there, he played Justice Shallow in a production of Henry IV, with fellow student Derek Jacobi as Prince Hal. By 1965, he had joined Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company at the Old Vic.
“When I was starting out as a young actor, you were a civil servant, paid by the government or the local authority to serve the nation. It was an honourable job. You had to join the union [Equity] and could do so only after you’d done 44 weeks in regional theatre. It was an enforced apprenticeship outside London.”
He saw all that change when Margaret Thatcher waged war on the unions. “In a stroke, she destroyed a system designed to protect actors’ livelihoods and began the decline of regional theatre,” he says. “She didn’t think, she didn’t know and perhaps she didn’t care. If I were living in any other city in the UK now I would resent the fact that the best of British theatre tends to stay where it is. The National Theatre doesn’t tour any more. The National Theatre!”
McKellen, an instinctive activist who came out in 1988 in protest against Section 28 and co-founded Stonewall a year later, took his own one-man show on tour in 2019 to raise money for 80 regional theatres. “These are the sorts of things that bother me, and which I try to do something about.”
His big-screen career owes a great deal to theatre: his film of Richard III was nominated for five Baftas in 1997, placing him firmly on Hollywood’s radar. A lead role in the 1998 James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters earned him an Oscar nod, followed by a second, three years later, for his unforgettable performance as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings.
Neither nomination led to an award – but McKellen doesn’t give a fig. “An Oscar is a prize, not an achievement,” he says. “You won’t find an actor who really believes in them. Anyway, when you are nominated you are expected to do an awful lot of publicity to encourage Academy members – you actually campaign to get their votes! I don’t think to not win one is a failure.”
Brendan Fraser, his co-star in Gods and Monsters, won last year’s Best Actor Oscar for The Whale, in which he wore 130kg of prosthetic fat to play a morbidly obese teacher. Presumably, those who accused that film of fat-phobia, will also object to the sight of the svelte McKellen donning a fat suit in Player Kings.
“Would it really be better if I put on the weight, and after the production is finished, take it off again?” he asks. “When I was growing up I don’t ever remember seeing an obese child – we were either all on rations or eating food grown in the garden. Similarly, Falstaff’s obesity is constantly being mocked, in ways that make you think that during the late 1500s there weren’t that many fat people around.
“Fatness isn’t always to do with lifestyle. On the whole though, it mainly is – and that’s all I want to say about being fat.”
The turn of the millennium ushered in one of the most surprising phases of McKellen’s career, when this august Shakespearean became a star of big-budget blockbusters, including the X-Men and The Lord of the Rings franchises. “I did enjoy working in Hollywood – it felt thrilling and exciting and cheeky to be accepted into an alien world,” he says now. “But I was never that interested in it, to be honest.”
Nor is he particularly keen on the place itself. “It feels like an apartheid. Go to Beverly Hills and the expensive real estate is owned by whites. The only non-white people are waiting at the bus stops to go back to what you might call the ghetto. You don’t look to Hollywood for social advancement.”
Did he experience any homophobia in the States? “Never. When I was working there, the person I saw the most was David Hockney. And Gore Vidal. You didn’t feel you were on your own with those giants around.”
McKellen, who lives alone, has never hidden his sexuality from his friends. Before Mathias, he had a significant relationship in the 1960s with Brian Taylor, a history teacher. Shortly after we meet, it is reported that he has separated from Oscar Conlon-Morrey, a 30-year-old actor with whom he performed in the 2022 pantomime, Mother Goose – but McKellen declines a subsequent request to comment on the matter.
Still, going public about being gay had a galvanising impact: “I freed myself up internally, emotionally,” he says. He recalls a 1992 National Theatre production of Uncle Vanya during which “in the Act Three scene when Vanya breaks down, I effortlessly began to sob. That had never happened to me before and I could only think that it was because there was nothing inside me I wanted to hide from anyone any more. In that sense, my acting got better. Of course, everything gets better: your relationships; your self-worth; your place in society.
“I love seeing the confidence of young people who have never come out because they’ve never been in,” he adds. “They are not living in a world where the closet is a required mode of living.”
He’s in little doubt that his family would have been “absolutely accepting of who I was”, had they known. His father, a civil engineer, died in 1964, a decade after the 12-year-old McKellen had lost his mother to breast cancer, a “devastating” blow from which he believes he has never fully recovered.
“At the time, I thought it was manageable. Looking back I don’t think it was. It’s not helpful at 12 to lose the person you love the most and who seems to love you equally. They’re irreplaceable. Throughout my entire life, whenever I fall in love with someone and want to devote myself to them, I always wonder: are they going to leave me one day?”
It’s a rare confession from a man who has always appeared to be most secure in his skin. But as he gets up to head home, McKellen is nothing if not sanguine. “When the body gives way, and your back is hurting, well, there you go. You have to put up with that. If your spirit is young, you can cope with it all.”
Player Kings is at New Wimbledon Theatre, London SW19 (playerkings theplay.co.uk), from March 1-9, then touring; Hamlet is in cinemas for one night only on Tuesday
