UK Edition
Sir Ian McKellen: 'Brexit makes no sense if you’re gay'
"Retirement! What does that mean?" Ian McKellen is scandalised by the suggestion that, at 77, the day may soon come when he takes his last bow on stage.
“Retirement from theatre would mean retirement from life. It doesn’t appeal to me. A few years ago, I decided to take six months off each year and see what happened – and what happened was, I got intensely bored. So I went back.”
It’s the kind of passion that explains a glittering career such as McKellen’s. Six Laurence Olivier Awards, one Tony, a Golden Globe, as well as two Oscars, in roles spanning Shakespeare and Beckett to Tolkien, where he made a legion of younger fans as Gandalf.
He’s soon to be back on the British boards in a revival of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. And it’s clear that the theatre remains his raison d’être. Reminiscences about old producers such as Binky Beaumont trip off his tongue far easier than answers to more personal topics, where McKellen becomes instantly more distant.
And though he recently revealed that his hearing is starting to fail, in his opinion age has only improved his performances. “I still feel the challenge of it at times. You think, ‘Do I really have to do this again?’ Of course you do! There’s an audience that has paid and has to be entertained.
“It gets easier with age; you know what you’re doing. I shall carry on. It’s quite good exercise, besides anything else.”
However, he’s currently on a hiatus from acting. Having agreed to write his memoirs last year, he cleared his schedule and set about the task – only to realise he didn’t want to do it.
After a lifetime of telling stories, this was one role he just didn’t fancy. Of his decision to give back the £1 million advance, rather than reflect on his life, he simply says: “I couldn’t remember most of it. It didn’t seem very interesting to me. I didn’t know who I was writing it for. I certainly wasn’t writing it for myself. I don’t want to go on a voyage of discovery.”
The upshot was nine completely free months. And a recording of a Beckett play for BBC Radio 4 aside, he has been busy “having a life”. “I’ve just done more of what I would have done less of,” he says, “seeing friends, visiting schools, attending funerals, doing things that come up.”
Next weekend, he will be opening the Blenheim Palace Flower Show at the Duke of Marlborough’s Oxfordshire estate. McKellen is something of a familiar face at flower shows. Each year, pictures emerge of him with his nose stuck into a rose. But he’s far from a passionate horticulturalist – he does it to support his old theatre friend, Mig Kimpton. They met when Mig was the front-of-house manager at the Playhouse Theatre in London. “Mig would occasionally pop a few flowers in the dressing room. His passion was flowers. He was a man of the theatre, but he spent all his spare time with flowers. I’ve even been in one of his shows where he filled the whole stage with flowers.”
McKellen doesn’t even have a garden at his London home in Limehouse, not far from the Grapes pub, which he co-owns with his former partner, Sean Mathias, and newspaper owner Evgeny Lebedev.
“Gardens are very hard work. I’m often away for long periods and gardens need constant tending. But I like flowers and I always have lots in the house. So when Mig asked me to come to his latest venture in Blenheim, I was only too happy.”
Before Blenheim, though, he is going to India, China and Russia to speak about a subject close to his heart. A long-time vocal advocate of gay rights (he came out in 1988, in protest at the proposed Section 28 clause that would prohibit the promotion of homosexuality), he has lived to see vast improvements but feels much work is still to be done at home and abroad. “I travel around quite a lot and visit schools, so I do sense what’s going on, and it’s going way beyond my expectations. There’s a lot to be positive about – but not in the countries I’m visiting.”
It is because of this issue that he hopes Britain will vote to remain in the EU on June 23. Conscious of how European legislation helped to enshrine gay equality during the Blair years, he says: “Now is the time to be backing Europe and giving back that sense of empowerment to countries in the European Union that are still very backward in this regard.
“If I were to look at ‘in’ or ‘out’ from that point of view, there’s only one point, which is to stay. If you’re a gay person, you’re an internationalist. I don’t want us to retract. I don’t want to and I won’t, whatever the vote happens to be. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it’s nearly the end of my life. And it’s up to the youngsters to decide, really.”
Come July it’s back to work, knuckling down to rehearsals for No Man’s Land. This sees him reunited with his old friend Patrick Stewart. “I’ve not seen Patrick for ages because he’s been so busy working on his TV show Blunt Talk [a sitcom that screens on Starz in the US]. I went to hear his wife Sonny Ozel, she’s a wonderful bluesy country and western singer, at a concert recently. So we will reunite and it will be lovely.”
The play will tour the UK before settling in for a 15-week West End run. Tickets are selling out already. Having originally performed the play on Broadway a few years ago, McKellen hopes to surpass its success here.
“We enjoyed it so much, we thought it would go even better with a home-grown audience who would get the references. There are some references to cricket that rather baffled the New Yorkers,” he admits.
If McKellen appears in more theatre than film, it’s not for lack of interest in the latter. Talking of the difficulties in getting movie projects off the ground, he says: “A friend might send you something where the film has no prospect of being made. You get people asking to borrow your name to get a film off the ground. There might be an offer of a film that’s fully financed, and then you can start talking. Then there might be actual dates. Well, you can’t hang around for these things. It’s much easier to organise something in the theatre and keep it in the family.”
Those nine months off have certainly left him wistful to be back where he’s most at home.
“I can’t wait to start rehearsals, then I can say no to everything else. No, I can’t open that garden fête; no, I can’t go to that awards dinner.”
Blenheim Palace Flower Show runs June 17-19 with Sir Ian McKellen opening the show on Friday 17. Telegraph readers can save 30 per cent on the cost of a ‘Park and Gardens’ entrance ticket to the event at blenheimpalace.com/DT2016
No Man’s Land is touring the UK from August; nomanslandtheplay.com