The three movie genres Ian McKellen hates with a passion: “Bore the pants off me”
Despite being 86 years old and a veteran of stage and screen since the early 1960s, you certainly can’t accuse Ian McKellen of not moving with the times: his latest role involves appearing ‘virtually’ in a New York play during which the audience all wear special mixed-reality glasses.
Which sounds like the stuff of magic, but then McKellen is no stranger to that world either, having dominated the X-Men movies as Magneto throughout the 2000s and, of course, as Gandalf the wizard in Peter Jackson’s historic Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Over a long career, he has covered almost every genre of film that you could imagine, aside from doing plenty of TV comedy, although his last venture into that, 2013’s Vicious opposite Derek Jacobi, was divisive to say the least, although it still found plenty of fans over a two-series run.
What he has excelled in is undoubtedly big-screen fantasy; not only did Jackson bring him back for three more films as Gandalf with the Hobbit trilogy, but he also narrated the Robert De Niro and Clare Danes adventure movie Stardust in 2007 and the Philip Pullman adaptation The Golden Compass the same year.
While he’s perfectly at home in drama or there are, however, certain types of films that McKellen won’t touch, as he revealed to The Telegraph, writing: “There are various film genres that I dislike. Cartoons bore the pants off me; I don’t like westerns because you can always work out what’s going to happen, and horror films either frighten me to death or are ridiculous”.
He did, however, single out a French comedy film from 1953 as being far more up his alley, a film known in its native tongue as Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and that would go on to be nominated for ‘Best Story and Screenplay’ at the following year’s Oscars.
McKellen continued: “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday suits my sense of humour. It’s virtually silent, and the jokes are so visual and tell you so much about people’s characters. My comic heroes are the silent ones, like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.”
Now, despite his advancing years, McKellen is set to play a pivotal part as his old character Magneto in the upcoming blockbuster Avengers: Doomsday from the Russo Brothers. Footage is beginning to emerge of what kind of role he will play in the enormous superhero crossover event that could well break all kinds of records when it hits cinemas in December. Initial trailers have shown that Magneto will meet up with his old foe Professor X, played by James McAvoy, while rumours suggest he could well take on Doctor Doom, the new evil part for Robert Downey Jr, after he bit the dust at the end of Avengers: Endgame.
Doomsday will bring together the Avengers, the Thunderbolts, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men in an all bets are off mash-up the likes of which moviegoers have never witnessed before. The budget to make the film is rumoured to be around $1billion, making it the most expensive production in cinema history, meaning it could potentially need to make two or three times that in revenue in order to make a profit.
One thing is for sure, McKellen won’t be short of a penny or two thanks to his part in the movie, with the major cast members supposedly raking in anything like $50-80million for their work on not just the first movie, but the follow-up Secret Wars, which will arrive in 2027.
