The movie Ian McKellen hated from the first second: “And it got worse from there”
Sir Ian McKellen is one of those actors who can always be relied upon to turn in a stellar performance.
He might not always choose the best vehicles for his talents (he is the only actor to have said yes to both The Da Vinci Code and Cats), but his acting can never be called into question, and whether he’s reciting Shakespeare or Elvish, he can send a chill down your spine – to watch him perform is to watch a master at work.
He is also a charming interview subject who, despite being one of the most celebrated actors of all time, never seems to lose his candour or self-deprecating wit, and this was on full display in a conversation in 2023 in which he discussed the importance of directors in his creative process, because he doesn’t just create his characters in a vacuum, he explained, but instead, he relies on the intuition of his director to tell him when something is working and when it isn’t.
This obviously requires a director who knows what they’re doing, and he was happy to name and shame one who absolutely did not. In 1983, McKellen appeared in Michael Mann’s The Keep, playing a Jewish Romanian historian who is freed from a concentration camp by the Nazis in order to explain why a shadowy entity with enormous biceps keeps shooting lasers at them. It’s a chaotic, incomprehensible mess that is either fun as hell or dumb as rocks (and possibly both), but it nearly broke McKellen from day one.
When the actor accepted the role, Mann told him that he would be playing a Romanian. Dutifully, McKellen went to Romania and learned how to speak with a Romanian accent. “Then on the first day of shooting, Michael told me he wanted me to speak with a Chicago accent,” McKellen recalled. “Well, I couldn’t do that, and it got worse from there.”
To add insult to injury, the actor played a much older character, which required him to sit in a makeup chair for hours every single day, as it was, he revealed, the worst professional experience of his life, which is really saying something.
Not only did McKellen survive Cats, but he also worked on a film directed by Brett Ratner, a man who has been accused by half a dozen women of sexual harassment and rape and who appears multiple times in the Epstein files, merely being in his presence must have been excruciating, even if you weren’t one of his victims.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy doesn’t look like it was particularly easy to film, either, with all that trekking around in the snowy New Zealand mountains. Then again, that is some people’s idea of the perfect holiday, so perhaps it was nothing short of magical.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, The Keep was not one of those gruelling productions that yield a masterpiece. It was more Megalopolis than Apocalypse Now. And whether they admit it or not, those who love it are probably more enamoured of its Tangerine Dream soundtrack than its Nazi-bashing laser ghoul or alleged Chicago accents. Either way, Mann has all but disowned it, dashing the hopes of those clamouring for a director’s cut.
