Ian Mckellen
I've always longed for the theatre and acting to be popular. No actor wants to play to an empty house. We only do it for an audience. The more the merrier. I don't make any distinction between a popular TV series or blockbuster film and doing Shakespeare. They're different, but as long as the material is good and the intention is honourable, it's all the same to me.Collection: Play
No one needs to feel sorry for me or anyone else who has fallen victim to success.Collection: Sorry
On the day after 9/11, I walking through the smoke and the smells of New York. There were knots of policemen everywhere. As I went past one officer, he called out: "Hi, Magneto." That's an indication of X-Men's extraordinary reach.Collection: New York
I've played an awful lot of people that other people would call villains, but that isn't a very helpful attitude to have if you're about to play them. They are just people, and they may do dreadful things and say dreadful things, but your job as an actor is to know why they do them or say them.Collection: Jobs
Journalists often ask me: "Aren't you sorry that after all the work you've done, you're best known as Magneto and Gandalf?" But that's what I've always wanted - not to be known as myself. I want to draw attention to the characters.Collection: Sorry
I was brought up in industrial south Lancashire, down the cobbled road from where LS Lowry (1887-1976) lived and painted.Collection: Lancashire
My acting stopped being about disguise and became about truth which suits the camera, so my film career took off when I came out.Collection: Careers
It may be my rather puritanical upbringing at odds with my inborn laziness that makes me feel guilty at the end of the day, unless I am able to point at some achievement. But this need be no more impressive than cooking a meal or going for a long walk.Collection: Long Walks
The performance is created by the director. The actor is the material. And I think that has to be true.Collection: Thinking
The audience's expectations are ever-present.Collection: Expectations
I have never wanted to be typecast, one of those actors who plays a variation on a one-note theme. So just as I enjoy playing a wide variety of characters, from good to bad to ugly to cute - so I have enjoyed of late working in film and television, as well as in theatres of various sizes and shapes.Collection: Cute
Quite low down in the list is "How much am I going to be paid?"... my main feeling about money is that I don`t want to feel as though I`m being taken advantage of... The other actors they asked to play Gandalf wouldn`t go to New Zealand on that money for that length of time. I thought it would be a bit of an adventure... I`m an eccentric actor, and there`s a lot of us around.Collection: Taken
I'm cheaper than Anthony Hopkins. The other actors they asked to play Gandalf wouldn't go to New Zealand on that money for that length of time. I thought it would be a bit of an adventure. Tony Hopkins didn't think it would be an adventure. Tony is part of Hollywood. I'm an eccentric English actor, and there's a lot of us around.Collection: Hollywood
If you're sounding right, you're probably walking right, and vice versa. If you get the footwork right - if you get even one line right in a rehearsal, the director will say, do you know when you said that, it was exactly the character. You were - really landed on it.Collection: Character
It is so painful watching yourself act, particularly because you can't do anything about it, it's all done and dusted.Collection: Done
A few years ago, a friend said to me: "You do realize, Ian, when X-Men and Lord of the Rings come out, your life will totally change?" I didn't know what he was talking about, but he was right. My life has totally changed - but in a good way. Unbeknownst to me, it's given me a lot more confidence.Collection: Men
That's the imagination that happens in the theater. That imagination is translated in film by the film magicians and all the technology.Collection: Technology
Ever since the invention of the camera, people have been trying to create 3D, because we see things in 3D, and everyone's aware that the camera doesn't.Collection: People
Success in the movies has pushed me to places I didn't know I was allowed to go.Collection: Knows
There are directors, and I think this is true of all directors, it would be true if I was a director - If the actor didn't want to do what I was suggesting, I would let him do it his way, and then I would say to him, "Just give me one where you do what the director wants", and that, of course, is the take that's used.Collection: Thinking
I think it's one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It's another thing to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It's not that they [my significant others] don't want to be identified as gay, but that they don't want to be identified as ... with me.Collection: Gay
It's a joy to be up close to Derek Jacobi's work. Alas, we haven't worked very much, over the years, since we were at university together, but I don't think I've missed many of his great shows and performances.Collection: Thinking
Most of the time when you do a job, a play or a film, you're wondering, "Will there be an audience?"Collection: Jobs
Some directors don't tell you that it's not your fault, so you get increasingly depressed that you're not delivering what's required, and then you discover it's not you at all, it's something in the background that's out of focus.Collection: Focus
I am going around British secondary schools, as a gay man talking about my life, and encouraging schools to get rid of homophobic bullying and to care for their gay members of staff and their gay students.Collection: Bullying
2D looks so flat. Well, it is, of course, it's flat. But 3D isn't. And for an adventure story that takes you into a long-distant, fictional world, it's ideal, I think.Collection: Adventure
Baz [Luhrmann] paid me one of the greatest compliments ever. I don't know him, really, but when I first met him I was congratulating him on ROMEO + JULIET - which I think is a wonderful adaptation - and he said, "Oh, well we couldn't have done it without your RICHARD III, which was an inspiration!" I've never quite checked up on the dates to see whether or if, in fact, we did our film before he did his.Collection: Inspiration
For old actors, just remember that inside you're only 14. Acting is for kids. You poor old grown-ups, you've forgotten how to do what kids know automatically.Collection: Kids
You would be surprised how many directors don't know what they want. They might not know what they want until they see it, they might know what they want but no idea how to get it out of the actor, then you've both got a problem.Collection: Ideas
Elijah looks angelic but his beauty of spirit is what makes his Frodo leap out of the screen. Unalloyed goodness is one of the most difficult attributes to act.Collection: Looks
I'm a latecomer to popular TV. This is rather new to me, being in a sitcom. It's been an ambition of mine.Collection: Ambition
The demographic of our audience is young. It also contains a high proportion of black, Jewish and gay people, who have all been encouraged by society to think of themselves as oddities or mutants. I hope that's why X-Men chimes with them - it's certainly why I was attracted to the idea in the first place.Collection: Gay
As for the clarity of the 48 frames, I've heard people say that it looks odd, it's too demanding, there's too much information, you don't know where to look.Collection: People
I think if I were asked to do as many as fifty takes, I would assume the director had no idea what he wanted, and was just hoping, eventually, to see it.Collection: Thinking
In the old-fashioned sitcoms, to be gay was, in itself, funny, and you laughed at the characters rather than with them.Collection: Character
Television can take anything. It can take the most exaggerated of storytelling forms.Collection: Television
When you're on stage with an audience, the director's nowhere to be seen. He's onto the next job.Collection: Jobs
The thing you notice here after America is how refreshingly ordinary people look, because they haven't had their chin wrapped around the back of their ears.Collection: America
I think I'm a bit gruffer than I used to be, and I'm certainly older.Collection: Thinking
My memory of 3D movies is Fernando Lamas in a swashbuckling movie. And I suppose it had been the fifties, in which swords came out at you, bullets came out at you, things were thrown into the auditorium, apparently. All that sort of cheap, "Oh, look at us, we've got 3D" isn't in the film.Collection: Memories