Ahead of his new film The Critic, Sir Ian McKellen has updated fans after he had to leave a London production of Player Kings after a fall from the stage in June.
Ian confirmed that while he’ll be offstage for at least a year, retirement is out of the question. “I’ll carry on until the knees give way or the memory gives way or the mind goes,” he said.
“There’s nothing else I’d rather do with my life than that. Much better to wear out than rust out, as they say.”
The Critic sees the legendary actor play acid-tongued, cantankerous gay theatre and film critic Jimmy Erskine, who built his career on his catty critiques in his arts reviews in the 1930s.
Jimmy is a barely closeted gay man, who cruises parks at night and employs his much younger lover Tom (Alfred Enoch) as a secretary. Jimmy’s sexuality is an open secret, but it troubles his publisher David Brooke (Mark Strong).
When Jimmy is arrested for “public indecency”, he hatches a ruthless scheme with struggling actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton) to get himself out of trouble.
Ian McKellen said: “Where [Jimmy’s] savagery comes from is what I had to work out.
“I think it’s because central to his life is the fact that he’s gay at a time when … it was against the law for two men to make love in the 1930s in the UK.”
Sir Ian McKellen came out as gay in 1988, but says over the decades the situation was more complicated.
“I wasn’t deep in some closet, but I was not totally honest and didn’t talk to the media about it. You were kept quiet by the fact that your nature, God-given you could say, was against the law,” he said.
“I know a couple of people just a bit older than me who were in prison for having made love.”
As for his character of Jimmy, Ian theorised, “If you spend your life being ill-treated by the laws of the land and by other people’s attitudes to your sexuality, is it any surprise that perhaps when it’s possible, you take revenge on others?”
