PLUME: As a tangent, you are one of the few openly gay leading actors in Hollywood today, in an atmosphere that talks liberally a lot of the time, but still don’t practice what they preach to some extent. Have you found that in any way difficult, or have you found that people really not even consider it when casting?

McKELLEN: Well if they do, they don’t tell me about it, of course. Since I came out, the self-confidence that I was talking about has been complete. I’m my own person, now. For so many years – every gay person knows this – they’ve been lying… to somebody. They’ve been dishonest. They’ve often become dependent on that and figured it as a way of life, and they can’t imagine any other way. They’d be lost without it. Why so many people stay in the closet is that they think this is how it was meant to be. I know men who come out discover that, “No, that’s the old you, and the new you is someone who other people – on the whole – prefer.” Sometimes admire, because people like honesty on the whole. My film career took off. Of the 20-dd parts I’ve played since coming out, only 3 have been gay… I’ve not been typecast. There may have been parts that I wouldn’t have been considered for, but if we’re talking about romantic leads – I’ve smooched with Greta Scacchi on-screen. I’ve played John Profumo, the English politician, who nobody remembers except he was a raging heterosexual who made love to Joanne Whalley-Kilmer under silk sheets. I played a straight rapist in a western.

PLUME: And audiences don’t seem to care one way or the other…

McKELLEN: No, of course they don’t.

PLUME: People in control of studios and networks make assumptions that there will be some massive wave of protest, but what it should really come down to – straight or gay – is talent…

McKELLEN: That’s right… and the job is called “acting”. You go to look at that. When you see me, you’re not seeing me – you’re seeing me acting as somebody. Audiences understand this… Producers seem to have a problem with it. Really, it’s not the producers, it’s the people who are trying to make the money – I’m talking now about television advertisers – because they are the people who make money out of anything done on television, and a lot of what’s on television is film. Advertisers have to sell us the lie that we’re all the same, because if we believe we’re all the same, we’ll all want to buy their product. The fact is, we’re not all the same. The rest of us understand that, and that’s why we like to go and watch television and see movies and theater – not to see ourselves, but to see something different.

PLUME: And also, to a larger degree, the attitudes of advertisers is based on perception on whether something would be the case, rather than reality…

McKELLEN: I fear that the wonderful British television program Queer as Folk is going to be made into an American television series. They’re changing one of the central characters ages from 15 to 18, because they’re frightened about what the audiences and the authorities might think if they showed a 15 year-old having gay sex on television – but that is the point of the story. That’s rather like saying, “Hamlet isn’t a university student – he’s a happily married man of 35.” You’ve got to laugh. I laugh at them and get on with my life.

PLUME: “And why is Hamlet’s father dead? That’s unhappy…”

McKELLEN: You can only speak from your own experience, and my experience is that it has been entirely beneficial, to me personally – to my career, to my life, to my relationships, to my relationships with my family, to my love-life. If you talk to other gay men and women and ask them do they regret coming out, I bet you wouldn’t be able to find one of them who would answer that they did regret it. I have to think selfishly that it’s been good for me, it’s good for other people and – in the end, and importantly, really – it’s good for the world. I’m not trying to solve the world’s problems… Just my own.

PLUME: We’ll move on to the next film… Apt Pupil, which was also your first time working with Bryan Singer…

McKELLEN: There was a part I didn’t think I could play. It was a fiendishly difficult accent – a Germanic/Californian mix. He was 20 years older than me. I seemed to have pulled it off. I had a really good time, but I like dressing up and putting on make-up and a disguise, at times.

PLUME: Do you think, as an actor, the make-up aids your getting into the character?

McKELLEN: It’s a great joy you have as an actor, when you’re suddenly looking at yourself in all this make-up and you look in the mirror and do the voice, and suddenly you discover your shoulders have gone into he right position and the hands are doing what they should be doing. Someone who’s seen that movie – someone I didn’t know and a rather senior person in the industry – went out of his way to call me up and said, “You are so brilliant, because I know that is how people of that generation used to hold their cigarettes when they were smoking them.” I hadn’t thought about it – I hadn’t done any research. I just happened to be doing it right, because I’d looked in the mirror and there was the man in front of me. That was the joy I got out of playing that part.

PLUME: What was your experience working with Brad Renfro?

McKELLEN: Brad couldn’t be more different from me if he tried. He’s a great deal younger, his interests are not mine – he likes the sort of music that isn’t to my tastes – his experience and his private life are quite other than my own, and I am English and he is American. But, nevertheless, we became good friends and we worked as well as we could together, I think. It was the differences between us, I think, that was surprising.

PLUME: But those were the differences between the characters in the film…

McKELLEN: Appropriate, yes.

PLUME: How would you describe your experience working for the first time with Bryan Singer?

McKELLEN: Well, it must have been good, because I’ve just been doing it again. Bryan and I became friends before we became colleagues at work, so each time has been a joy to know that I was going to see my friend at work. What I admire most about him is his taste. I think he’s got an immaculate sense of style, and that’s a very important thing if you’re a director.

PLUME: That brings me to X-Men, which drew you out of your sabbatical…

McKELLEN: Yup.

PLUME: What drew you in, when you read the script? What was strong enough to pull you out of your respite?

McKELLEN: I was intrigued about being involved in something which was potentially going to draw in a wide, popular audience. I thought, as a piece of very popular entertainment, that it had every chance to work. The fundamental argument between the X-Men and Magneto is one which applies to other minorities – and, in a sense, gay men are mutants, Jews are mutants… Any minority is likely to consider the argument between Xavier and Magneto. Do we integrate? Do we play down our differences? Do we assimilate? Do we appear normal? Or do we, in Magneto’s view, declare our differences, be proud of them, and even prepare to fight the majority? That’s an interesting dilemma, isn’t it? You don’t find that in all the comics that have been filmed. I wasn’t sure that I could do it… I don’t know that I have done it – we’ll have to wait and see.

PLUME: This was also your first big “special effects” movie. What difficulties were there in dealing with that?

McKELLEN: It’s not as difficult as it seems, because any set you stand on – in the stage or a film – is likely to be incomplete. It can be very thrilling when you’re on location and to be actually there – have to be in a room with four walls and somehow the camera’s squeezed in with you. Even then, you’ve got 50 other people who aren’t meant to be there, because they’re all behind the camera. In other words, the circumstances you’re working with are always you and the audience, you and the camera – what’s behind you and around you is not incidental, but it’s very rarely complete, so to be doing a scene in front of a blue screen isn’t that different from doing it in front of a perfectly crafted piece of scenery. It’s not that different, really.

PLUME: Was there anything that struck you as particularly difficult about the filming?

McKELLEN: Well, it was very cold at 3 o’clock in the morning in Canada, but I was fortunately able to wear thermals. Poor Rebecca Romijn-Stamos was stark naked, so she was the brave one – not me.

PLUME: And you enjoyed your second outing with Bryan Singer?

McKELLEN: Yes, I did. He shouted at me as usual, but that’s alright.

Continued below…

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