National Treasure, Stately Homo

Ian McKellen sizes himself up

The Observer, April 2006

Sir Ian McKellen arrives at the Covent Garden Hotel looking very professorial with lots of papers under one arm and a harried air. It is mid-afternoon, and he wants some food - a bit of soup and plain pasta. 'Anything to drink?' his assistant Clair wonders. He looks at her, and then has a sudden thought. 'I'll drink the soup!'

He settles into a sofa. I tell him I have just been to my first civil partnership, and McKellen says he attended the union of Michael Cashman and Paul Cottingham. 'I was a witness with Michelle Collins. There was a groom's side and a groom's side, and you had to decide where to sit.' He says he got a bit weepy. 'They didn't call it marriage, although you can call it anything you want. The one thing you cannot mention is God, that is absolutely verboten. I suppose I'm a bit mean-spirited, but I really can't see why the government couldn't just say gay people can get married - that would have been true equality and so much simpler. But that hasn't been done because they couldn't face the furore. So they've passed a law that is not available to straight people - straight people cannot have a civil partnership, they have to get married - extraordinary.' McKellen has been in two eight-year relationships that he once referred to as quasi-marriages, but says he is 'very suspicious' of the institution. 'I can just sniff a divorce in the air. So the next thing to happen will be a gay couple getting divorced.'

The conversation moves to the great gay progress since McKellen took tea with John Major at Downing Street in the early-Nineties (about the time Stephen Fry affectionately renamed him Serena). Many fine advances in the legal framework, he observes, but social equality will still take time. He says he is in two minds about laws that curtail free speech, but suggests he would draw the line at homophobic religious leaders. 'On the whole I think it would be nice if people were polite to each other, although sometimes these leaders make it very difficult to be polite about Catholicism ...' Then another sudden thought. 'We're talking a lot of gay stuff - people don't want to read this.'

He is hoping they'd rather read about The Da Vinci Code and X-Men 3, both of which feature McKellen in prominent roles and open in a few weeks. But there are problems with this. When we meet there have been no advance screenings of either film, and I haven't read the book or comics on which they are based. 'The Da Vinci Code is the most popular book of our times,' McKellen muses, just in case I hadn't even heard of it. 'You've not read it? Well, you're at a disadvantage.'
'Or possibly an advantage.'
'Could well be,' he reasons. 'It's a very good part in a big movie. Very well paid. Filming in England, which is a curiosity. It's a rattling good yarn, and so is the film, or what I've seen of it. Very excitingly shot.'

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