PLUME: You’ve worked with a lot of filmmakers in recent years, like Bryan Singer, and have been one yourself… How does that affect the mindset of those producing the films?
McKELLEN: I think that on the whole – I wouldn’t say this is true of Bryan – the filmmakers are not thinking beyond the first weekend. They are always thinking about the big screen, but it’s me who’s saying, “Don’t you realize that most people aren’t going to see it that weekend? Most people in the end – including the block-busting Titanics – will be seeing them on their own.” The difference between watching a comedy on your own and in a theater is obvious – you don’t laugh at home. It’s very unusual to laugh out loud when alone – it’s not natural. But you are released from your inhibitions, oddly enough, when you’re in the cinema or a theater full of people who are laughing. You have a much better time as a group.
PLUME: Do you think as a culture – just by the nature of our modern entertainment’s – that we’re shifting towards being solitary people? Merely for convenience sake?
McKELLEN: It may well be. The potency of the laptop is difficult to judge yet… It’s all too new. I’m not as pessimistic about it as all that…
PLUME: Or do you think that it’s in our nature to seek out that group experience?
McKELLEN: I don’t know about the cinema -cinema’s a very new invention – but theater is a very old way of storytelling, and it goes back thousands of years, and it will never disappear. It may change, but public storytelling in a public place – where you can see and hear a three-dimensional human being – may be seen now as an old-fashioned, labor-intensive, too-expensive way of going about it, but it’s a human level. An awful lot of the way we communicate at the moment is not human… I have no idea what your face is doing at the moment, I have no idea whether you’ve got somebody else in the room who you’re more interested in than listening to me – I can’t judge it, and vice-versa. In a theater or a marketplace or a in a public debate, you know what’s going on and you can see what’s happening and you’re a part of it and you’re reminded that’s what being a human being is – it is being in the presence of other human beings and enjoying that… Touching them and confronting them and everything else that human beings do to each other. I would feel very sorry for someone who didn’t know about that experience, or have access to it.
PLUME: At what point did you consider yourself to be on the same level as your peers? At what point did you no longer feel like an amateur, but instead felt on the level of having some accomplishments behind you?
McKELLEN: Well, after I’d been acting for about 10 years and I did Shakespeare’s Richard II, and Arnold Turner and I did Marlowe’s play Edward II – this began at the Edinborough theater and then toured the United Kingdom and played for two sell-out seasons in London – and I was playing both leading parts. I didn’t say to myself, “Oh, this proves that I’m better than other people…” but after I’d done that job, I discovered that employers and audiences seemed to know who I was and seemed to want me to play other parts. So it was after about 10 years.
PLUME: Was it personally gratifying to have that recognition?
McKELLEN: Yes, and a bit unexpected. I was genuinely unambitious as a young actor, in terms of wanting to be famous or a star – but once you discover the joy and the challenge of playing the leading part, you want to do it again. That hasn’t stopped me on many occasions on stage and in cinema playing supporting parts – they too can have satisfaction. Certainly in film, you don’t have to play the leading part to feel important, because while the camera is turning you are the leading actor. If it’s a close-up of you, the star of the movie will be behind the camera feeding you your lines and so – whilst you’re working – you feel very important. Less so in the theater, but if you’re doing a Chekov play, there is no leading part. Because your part’s smaller than somebody else’s, you don’t feel less involved. There is a special satisfaction in playing what we call a “play-carrying” part.
PLUME: Do you think it’s almost more challenging to go back and play the supporting roles?
McKELLEN: Yes, because if the playwright hasn’t done his work properly, the part – because it’s smaller – will make special demands on the actor’s need to get it right within the one or two scenes in which you appear. If you play Hamlet, you can have an off-period for three quarters of an hour and still grab them back in the fifth act. It’s true that playing smaller parts can be more difficult.
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