McKellen: Playing the Part Review ★★★★

At the age of 78, Ian McKellen looks back on his life, both professional and private. He talks of growing up in Wigan and developing a love for the stage, as well as the complicated path he had as a gay man in a changing society and becoming a film star well after he imagined it was possible.
★★★★
Everyone likes Ian McKellen. How could you not? It’s like not being keen on baby animals or weekends: a definitive sign of a wrong’un. To call this film a documentary would somewhat misrepresent it. It is McKellen’s account of his life, in a long-form interview, with just a few archival clips. No other interviewees. No additional voiceover. It doesn’t need it. McKellen is both a naturally brilliant storyteller and a fascinating story in himself. The film is 90 minutes long but it could happily be ten times longer.

If your experience of McKellen begins with X-Men or The Lord Of The Rings, you may not know quite what a fight he had on his hands to get to that position. A large part of the interview is about McKellen being gay, not because that’s the most interesting thing about him, but because for a long time it defined his career. He came out in a time when to do so meant becoming ‘openly gay actor Ian McKellen’ and having to be a spokesperson for countless people who had very few public voices. He talks about the horror of living through the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s. We see him being miraculously polite in a TV debate with people who argue against age of consent parity for all sexualities because it would “spread” homosexuality, which a traditional society would not find acceptable. He talks of how living an open life affected his career opportunities. It’s poignant to watch him give this interview at the age of 78, talking with wonder about how he meets 13-year-olds who feel confident in a range of sexualities, a possibility that was never open to him.

Film comes late in proceedings because McKellen was a late cinematic bloomer, but the yarns he spins on his way to his current fame are a joy. He talks of his first brush with cinema, the offer of a film with Gregory Peck, and how it collapsed because of bad weather, so he swore off cinema for ages. He speaks of thinking he “wasn’t very good as Magneto [in X-Men] and had that confirmed when I watched the films”. Demonstrably untrue, but a hoot to listen to. He has the perfect ear for detail after a lifetime of performance. He’ll drop in that the man who interviewed him for a place at university offered “a South African sherry” or how in a local market in his childhood the man selling hair-restorer wore a wig. It’s not vital to the story, but he paints pictures for you. He is a faultless raconteur.

Right at the start of the film, before we’ve even seen him, we hear McKellen say he considers every interview a performance, a version of “Here Comes Ian McKellen!” This film seems like the unfiltered man, but even if it’s an act, it’s an endlessly compelling one.

An absolute treat of an interview with a man who has told other people’s stories wonderfully for decades and tells his own just as well.