We’re off to see the wizard: We check in with Ian McKellen at home

LONDON — Ian McKellen is running late. We’re meeting in his townhouse, located along the Thames in east London. It feels almost like a scene from his new film, “The Christophers,” about an aging painter living in a similarly historic abode.

It becomes even more uncanny when I’m led into a book-filled living room that overlooks the river and asked to wait a few minutes. The walls are covered with paintings, some crookedly hung, and there’s an enormous David Hockney book displayed on a stand. It was given to McKellen by the artist, a longtime friend, for the actor’s 80th birthday.

When McKellen does emerge, wearing a blue zip-up hoodie and black sweatpants, he has a mischievous look in his eye. Instead of shaking my hand or saying hello, he intones, “Do you know why this is called the sitting room?” The well-worn sofa and adjacent armchairs suggest it’s because people sit in it. I say so.

“You’re a journalist,” McKellen bats back. “Look around.”

It soon becomes clear that all of the paintings, which include a drawing by English painter L.S. Lowry, depict someone sitting. The actor, 86, finds the revelation delightful, triggering a hint of whimsical glee reminiscent of Gandalf himself.

Once he settles on the sofa beside me, McKellen vacillates between performative storytelling and genuine reflection. We’re ostensibly meeting to discuss the new film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, about a painter grappling with his legacy. But the discussion veers wildly. He offers up memories like gifts: studying drama at Cambridge alongside Derek Jacobi in the late 1950s, Meryl Streep surprising him with a gooseberry crumble while filming 1985’s “Plenty,” a fireman at Ground Zero calling him Magneto after he walked into Lower Manhattan two days after Sept. 11, 2001.

“I say to young actors, ‘I didn’t play Magneto until I was 60,’” McKellen says of the stardom he experienced later in life. He was nominated for his first Oscar at 59 in 1999 for Bill Condon’s “Gods and Monsters” and subsequently joined the X-Men franchise and Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films. “I’d been well-known,” he recalls. “I’d been on Broadway, the West End, toured the world. But nothing is like the fame that film brings.”

Growing up in Lancashire in northern England, McKellen never aspired to be a movie star. “My parents gave me the impression that cinemas were dangerous places,” he says. “They called them flea pits because you caught diseases there.” Instead, the family went to the theater.

“When I thought of being an actor, I thought of being on a stage,” he says. “I used to think of myself as a civil servant, providing entertainment.” After three years of stage work in the early 1960s, he asked an agent how he could get into film. “He said, ‘Wait until your late 20s, that’s when women find men most attractive,’” McKellen says. He laughs at the irony — the actor came out publicly as gay in 1988. “I took that advice and I kept going in the theater and I’m very glad I did,” he adds.

His first screen role came at age 30 in Michael Hayes’ 1969 drama “The Promise.” McKellen has made dozens of films since, from superhero blockbusters to character-driven indies like “Six Degrees of Separation” and musicals such as “Beauty and the Beast” and even the maligned “Cats.”

Still, McKellen claims the process of making a film is “all a bit of a bafflement.” He says he asks every director how to act for the camera, but none of them will tell him. Once, on the set of the 2018 Shakespearean biopic “All Is True,” director Kenneth Branagh told McKellen to move his head less. “Wonderful note,” he agrees. “I do move my head too much.”

When shooting “The Christophers” in London early last year, McKellen asked Soderbergh the same question. “He said, ‘I won’t be doing that,’” the actor recalls. “And he didn’t.”

“I wouldn’t even want to answer that with a straight face,” Soderbergh says, speaking over Zoom from his office in London. “I don’t think we ever even spoke about it again.”

“The Christophers” is based on a one-sentence idea Soderbergh came up with and shared with screenwriter Ed Solomon, his collaborator on the 2021 thriller “No Sudden Move” and on the TV shows “Mosaic” and “Full Circle.” He imagined an older artist in a situation with a younger artist where “it’s a ruse but I didn’t know what the ruse was,” the filmmaker says.

Solomon ran with it, writing a compelling character study about a famous but washed-up British painter named Julian Sklar (McKellen) whose two estranged children surreptitiously hire Lori Butler (“I May Destroy You’s” Michaela Coel), an art restorer and forger, to complete an unfinished series that could be worth millions.

“The worst possible outcome for a creative person is utter irrelevance,” Soderbergh says. “You’d rather be somebody that makes things that get people angry than things that generate a shrug or, worse, nothing. I kept thinking: How do you physicalize that idea? My fear led me to this idea of an artist at the end of their career who’s not relevant anymore.”

This is less of a concern for McKellen personally. When asked if the film made him consider his own legacy as an artist, he shrugs. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

Solomon wrote the screenplay with the actor in mind. Neither he nor Soderbergh knew about McKellen’s great love of painting. In late 2024, Soderbergh and Solomon met with McKellen on the same sofa where we’re now doing this interview. Soderbergh brought the actor a small, framed collage he’d made.

“As soon as I walked in, I thought, ‘The last thing this guy needs is another piece of art, especially from me,’” Soderbergh says. “But he was very sweet about it.”

McKellen is incredulous that “The Christophers” was written for him. Still, he recognizes the correlations between himself, an aging gay artist with a complex legacy, and the far more disillusioned Julian.

“My connection with Julian is that he’s a showoff,” McKellen says. He twirls his glasses in his hand as he speaks. “He’s aware of his position in the world. He lives by himself and he’s gay and he’s been unhappy in love. He’s inquisitive and he’s domineering — I can sort of relate to that.”

He looks at me pointedly. “But I’m a lot happier than he is.”

“My connection with Julian is that he’s a showoff,” McKellen says of his new character. “He’s inquisitive and he’s domineering — I can sort of relate to that. But I’m a lot happier than he is.”

(Davd Urbanke / For The Times)

Despite McKellen’s apparent modesty about his film acting, he’s always had a tremendous presence on screen. His performance in “The Christophers” is remarkably alive. There is an electricity that threads through every scene. It’s McKellen reveling in a great role: charmingly funny but also bittersweet in the film’s examination of how fading fame can calcify one’s soul.

McKellen says it helped that Soderbergh shot the film speedily over 19 days, rarely doing more than two takes. As usual, the director operated the camera himself.

“When you go to Pinewood to make the Avengers movie with all those Marvel characters, you do see the directors, they come and talk to you, but whilst you’re filming they’re watching it from somewhere else,” McKellen says. “Steven’s there with you behind the camera. I think that was what was so enjoyable about it.”

McKellen seems like someone who could find the fun in anything. He’s remarkably spry for his age and, unlike his character in “The Christophers,” goes out regularly, often to the theater. Last night, he went to see “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” at the National Theatre. He owns the pub on the corner near his house, the Grapes. He laughs uproariously when he remembers something that delights him, like his relationship with Streep.

“When we said goodbye, I said, ‘Now, can we do a play?’” McKellen says. He mimics Streep’s accent almost perfectly: “‘Oh, I love that. Yes. I can’t at the moment, though, I’ve got a full career. But it won’t last for long.’”

The impression stops. He leans his head back and guffaws. “I’m still waiting for that call.”

Acting onstage is currently a tenuous subject for McKellen. Last year he shifted his focus solely to movies. He filmed “The Christophers,” returned to play Magneto in the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday,” shot the British rom-com “Frank and Percy” and embodied Lowry, a painter he calls vastly underappreciated, in the BBC’s “L.S. Lowry: The Unheard Tapes.”

All of this was purposeful in response to a very dark moment in the actor’s life and career.

In the summer of 2024, McKellen was midway through a stage performance of “Player Kings” — Robert Icke’s modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s two-play “Henry IV” — at the Noël Coward Theatre in London when he tripped during a fight scene and fell off the stage. Although he wasn’t badly injured, the incident shook him.

“As they laid me out on the stage, I said, ‘I’m dying,’” McKellen says of a frightening 2024 stage fall. “And I thought I was. I was out of control.”

(Davd Urbanke / For The Times)

When I ask about it, he stares out at the Thames for what feels like an endless stretch of silence. The waves are audible against his balcony.

“I don’t really like to talk about it because it was a very shocking business,” he finally admits. There’s a tonal shift in the room. He doesn’t look at me as he recalls slipping on a piece of newspaper.

“As I fell off the stage into the lap of an unfortunate audience member, I said to the full house, ‘I don’t do this,’” he says. “Meaning, I’m an actor who’s in control of what he’s doing.”

He grimaces at the memory. “As they laid me out on the stage, I said, ‘I’m dying,’” he says. “And I thought I was. I was out of control. Things were happening to me that I wasn’t able to stop. And what I’m left with is a feeling of horror. I don’t ever want that experience of being out of control.”

McKellen suffered a chipped vertebra and fractured wrist, but he says the doctors didn’t find anything else wrong with him. He certainly wasn’t dying.

“I was able to go back to X-Men land and destroy New Jersey, effortlessly,” he says proudly, raising his hands like Magneto in the throes of power. “I was able to do all the filming. But the stage…”

He trails off. He gazes back out at the river. It’s a hurdle McKellen has yet to clear, but he’s made some strides forward. In January, he performed a series of solo fundraiser shows at London’s Orange Tree Theatre and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in January.

“I loved being in front of the audience again,” he says. “I got all my laughs. So I’m OK. But I haven’t been in a play yet.” He hints at a possible production that’s local to his house, but it’s not actually been written yet. “We’re still trying to find it,” he says.

That performance will likely happen later this year after McKellen returns from New Zealand, where he’s making his return as Gandalf in Andy Serkis’ “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.” It will be his first time playing J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic wizard since 2014’s “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.”

“The success of those films is not in the amount of money they’ve made, but in the effect the actual stories have on people who’ve watched them,” McKellen says of his wizardly creation, a fictional father figure to millions worldwide. “I am part of this phenomenon. I couldn’t say, ‘Oh, no, that was long ago, I do different things now.’ I felt I had to do it.”

Our interview runs long, not because it started late but because McKellen is so full of anecdotes. He recalls filming the original “Lord of the Rings” in a studio that wasn’t soundproofed, so a crew member had to sit on the roof and shout into the walkie-talkie when a plane was about to pass over. He lists a few Shakespeare characters he has yet to play, but maybe never will.

“I wish I’d played Benedict in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and Antonio in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ who was one of Shakespeare’s gay characters,” he says. “I’m too old.”

His mischievous look reappears. “I never wanted to play Falstaff,” he says, of Shakespeare’s portly, boastful knight from “Henry IV.” “I was talked into it and I fell off the stage.”

Before I leave, McKellen flips through the giant David Hockney book, showing me a personalized dedication from the artist.

“He never stops painting,” McKellen says, clearly understanding the compulsion to keep creating. He could have had a very different life as a theater actor in the north of England. But then we wouldn’t be here today.

“If I hadn’t gone to Cambridge, I would have pursued what I’d intended to do, which is to become an actor, but an amateur actor or a teacher,” he says. “And my life outside my work would be my hobby of acting.”

“But my hobby became my business,” he adds. “Wasn’t I lucky?”