The Wizard: Ian McKellen

As an actor, Ian McKellen casts a spell over the audience watching any play or movie he's starring in. As Gandalf, one of the chief wizards of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings, he literally gets to weave his magic and help save the world.

Interview in NYC by Kathleen Mantel

While other children played happily with dolls, soldiers and trucks, Sir Ian McKellen played with a cardboard pop-up Victorian theatre. Born in 1939 in World War Two England, McKellen attended his first play at the age of three. And after a time at Cambridge where he spent more of his energies on acting than study, McKellen was invited by Sir Laurence Olivier to join the National Theatre Company.

There is an intrinsic theatricality to McKellen, an unconscious tendency to quote Shakespeare often and make it utterly appropriate. He has built his life around the concept of the imagination and the reality of the performance, both in theatre and in film. Throughout his four decades on the stage, McKellen also starred in a number of films. His recent roles range from a former Nazi concentration camp commander living in suburban America in Apt Pupil, a bitter and twisted Richard III, James Whale, the aging gay director of Frankenstein in Gods and Monsters, and the evil Magneto in X-MEN.

As Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, McKellen embodies a 7000 year old wizard. "At lunchtime, my wig was pinned back and the beard was bundled into a hair-net to keep it out of the way of salad and dessert," he laughs.

Gandalf is a friend to the Hobbits and to all good races. He has laboured. for 2000 years to put an end to the Dark Lord Sauron's reign of evil. Gandalf adds a calm and rational presence to the Fellowship and can always be counted on for advice. Despite his age and his crooked back, he remains a powerful force against evil.

PAVEMENT. What was your relationship with the book when you were offered the role?

IAN MCKELLEN: I'm not a great reader. I'm not a person who likes to get lost in long books. So I was rather unprepared for LOTR. What I did was I read the script, which was a riveting story and a very good part. But I was really hooked when I met Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh, who came to my house in London a year before we started filming. They showed me some of the designs and I picked up from them an absolute commitment and a care for the material they were working on. Plus, a sense that you don't always pick up from a director, that everyone in the project - in this case, hundreds and thousands of people - would be drawn into the family of the director. They would not be his employees. They would not have to do what they were told all the time but they would be part of the family. And sometimes it felt as though we were making a home movie. It didn't feel like we were making a big Hollywood film. It was all happening in Peter Jackson's back yard. His back yard, of course, being New Zealand, which has the most amazing landscapes and people necessary to bring it off. Whilst we were there, the biggest employer, the biggest industry in New Zealand, was the making of LOTR. It was a big event. And you picked that up when you met Peter Jackson, that this was going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity, not just for him but for everybody involved. I liked him very much indeed. He seemed very down to earth, very available, intelligent, committed, a very good sense of humour... And I quite like a man who doesn't wear any shoes and socks. He only has one pair of shoes and he doesn't like wearing them. You'll see Viggo Mortensen today is not wearing shoes and I'm not wearing socks. We've all caught the Kiwi habit.

P: Are you surprised that you have moved from traditional Shakespeare to cinematic sci-fi?

IM: I've got Catholic tastes when it comes to entertainment. I like musicals, ballet, opera, music hall, pop music, Shakespeare, plays in foreign languages, movies, MTV... It all seems to be the same business. I like politics. It's all about acting. The whole of life is about acting, really. Pretending. Putting on a face, deciding what costume to wear each morning as you get up. It's all fascinating to me. All the world's a stage, all the men and women merely players. It isn't money that guides me and it's not the possibility that one project might have millions and millions of people interested in it rather than a few. If the script isn't good, it doesn't matter how much moneys being offered, I won't be doing it. And that's been true since I started. Now I'm very, very happy and it makes me giggle that at 62, I'm allowed to be playing leading parts in big studio movies. Who would have thought it?

P: There are a lot of special effects in the film: blue screens, fake sets, different sized sets, monsters... Coming from the stage originally, how was this for you?

IM: Well, it's acting. Doesn't matter where you are. Imagine telling a story on a stage and the amount of imagination that goes into that. You're not where you seem to be. The audience might believe that you're in a room but you're in a room with only three walls. The fourth wall is the audience. An actor has to deal with the conventions of pretense, make believe. Shakespeare says, 'Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.' You've got to contact the audience's imagination. That's a lot more difficult on the stage than it is on a screen, where you may be standing on a mountainside with the wind blowing through your hair. You don't have to pretend you're cold. You look cold because you are cold.

P: Is acting as physically demanding as it looks?

IM: At times. But, on the whole, actors are very well looked after. They don't want the actors getting ill or having accidents because that means filming will stop. So you get well fed and you're always kept warm or cool, whatever's appropriate. There are armies of people to look after you. So if you suddenly have to ride a horse without a saddle, which Gandalf has to do; if you suddenly have to lead an army of 3000 people, which I did one day, under a live volcano, Mount Ruapehu; if you're clamouring on virgin snow that you've been dropped on by a helicopter, which then leaves because it has a camera inside, you think this is fun because you know that in a quarter of an hour the helicopter's going to come back and take you to a nice warm tent where you'll have a three-course lunch... It's all right. You don't have to worry about actors. It's much more tiring being in a play eight times a week, telling the story right through from the beginning to the end, the audience looking at you the whole time. That's where discipline comes in. Thats where the real physical hard work comes in. Acting in the theatre's a young man's game. Film acting's for the seniors.

P: When did it dawn on you how enormous LOTR is?

IM: Only when I got letters on my website and I began to nip into Tolkieds fan sites.

P: How did this affect you playing the character of Gandal?

IM: It could have been a source of tension on the Film. For instance, if Peter Jackson had been basing his film on Tolkien, as opposed to trying to realise the cinematic qualities of the writing on the screen. The credit at the end of the film is not going to say it's a Peter Jackson film. He doesn't think of it like that. He thinks of it as a Tolkien film. So because it's a fan making a film, I didn't have to worry too much about the millions of other fans who weren't making the film but who were nervous about the film or who were looking forward to it. They're constantly bringing up ridiculous things like, 'Why have you cut this character?' Or, 'Why have you done this?' Well, you can't film every character in the film. The film would last a lifetime. But as for the character being popular and people having expectations about seeing him for the first time, it's not unrelated to the problems you're having when you're playing Hamlet. An awful lot of the people who are coming to see Hamlet will have seen other Hamlets and have the ideal of the last Hamlet in their mind that they've seen. You just can't take that into account. You have to work in the confines of the people who you're working with and with the script that you're working on and hope that you're believable in your own terms and that other people whose vision of Gandalf may be different from mine will put their vision aside and say, 'Okay, I'll go with this one.'

P: You've said that this is a once in a lifetime thing and you will probably be the only person ever to play Gandalf in a film such as this.

IM: I know. But Gandalf has been interpreted by every single reader who has read the book, which is my point. So you can't start thinking, 'How am I going to make everyone happy?'' You just go back to the Bible, which is LOTR books. And there it was, everyday. I mean, I had two copies in my hand when I went to the set each day. One was the script and one was the book. And if you wanted to change something in the script, if you had an idea, there was often resistance from Peter until you said, 'But Peter, look up page 327. There it is." And he would say, 'Yes, you're quite right. Let's do it.' And that was always what was started with.

P: There are a lot of themes of male friendship in times of peace and in times of war in LOTR. Why do you think Tolkien wrote such a male dominated tale?

IM: Well, that's led gay observers to believe that the relationship between the middle class Frodo and his working class servant Sam contains a sexual element. I think Tolkien would be very surprised about that. However, Tolkien had been in the First World War and his son, while he was writing LOTR, was serving in the Second World War. I can't help thinking that Sauron is Adolf Hider because the feeling was if you could only cut off Adolf Hider's head, it would all be all right. If you could just get rid of Sauron, then it's all over. It's not true of course but it'll do for a myth, won't it? At the end of the story, Sam happily gets married to his girlfriend Rosie and they have a child and that's the last image of the book. So I don't think Tolkien was writing a gay tract. But, yes, it is a male story. Now you may think that's a limitation of it but there are very powerful women in the story. My character Gandalf doesn't seem to have a sexuality at all. Well, he is an immortal. He's been around for 7000 years. For my taste, I would prefer it if there were more women in the story and I would have liked a bit more sex because, you see, there isn't much sex in this story, which means that it is a film that is so easy for kids of 12 to see. The censors are only riveted by sex and bad language. There's no bad language, there's precious little sex. And, as for violence, most of the blood in the movie is black blood because Orcs don't have red blood. And that's fine with the censors. This story is about really important grown up things but kids will be allowed to see it who are the same age as those who are allowed to see Harry Potter, which isn't about anything important in comparison.

P: You spoke to groups of school children while you were in New Zealand. What else did you do in the community?

IM: I went to the drama school and they did the... What do you call it? [McKellen gestures with his arms and legs]

P: Haka.

IM: Haka. I opened the gay and lesbian film festival in Wellington. I went to the Prime Minister's house and had a vege burger in her garage because it was raining. I met a lot of individuals.

P: Culturally, did you pick up a little of New Zealand when you were there?

IM: Oh, yes, yes. I did pick up a boyfriend.