Times Colonist from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada • 8

A8 Times Colonist Sunday December 8 2002 TOP STORIES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW "I'm openly gay but I'm also a war baby and an Englishman. I'm not proselytizing or campaigning or going on a rampage or pushing forward a political agenda, but by just mentioning it in response to an inquiry, some good has been done." MICHAEL D. REID McKellen: No thoughts of winding down -V- i 5iV I. a i WW- From Page Al Here's one: While director Peter Jackson and his all-star Lord of the Rings cast were off to London, New York and Wellington, N.Z. to promote the Dec.

1 8 opening of The Two Towers, the middle chapter of the Middle Earth trilogy, McKellen decided to pass. Instead, he chose to come to Victoria for three weeks of filming on Entile, Vancouver writer-director Carl Bessai's low-budget feature about a Canadian-born academic who returns home decades after moving to England to patch things up with his estranged family. The film, which also stars Deborah Kara Unger and Ian Tracey, concludes Bessai's trilogy of movies (the others were Johnny and Lola) about characters with identity issues. "Is it me escaping from the junketing of Lord of the Rings'! Well, that is the effect," says Sir Ian with his crisply distinctive accent before tucking into a plate of fish-and-chips at his hotel. "All the hobbits are there, so they'll be fine, and I can be doing this little film." McKellen's experience in Victoria has been quite the opposite of his stay since the end of June in Vancouver, where most of the X-Men sequel was shot.

He was put up at a comfortable Point Grey home overlooking English Bay and worked just 15 days on X-Men 2 during his five months there. On Emile, he's also working 15 days, but within a mere month, and he's in almost every scene. During his stay here, McKellen, 63, has managed to drop into Munro's bookstore, visit some art galleries and tried twice to see a play at the Belfry that was sold-out, but for the most part he's been focusing on "the work." A free-wheeling conversation at the end of a long day reveals it's an experience this gracious actor relishes. "I've been luxuriating, as it were, in the sauna and now I'm having a cold shower," he says with a smile, cupping his hands behind his head and looking relaxed in denim pants and a red knit pullover that matches snazzy red slip-on shoes studded with tiny black dots. "I felt I needed my six months in B.C.

to be more than just doing 15 days on a sequel to a movie I've already made." He received the Emile script in London when he was starting a journey that Sir Ian McKellen on the set of movie Emile, shot in Victoria. would include doing pickup shots for The Two Towers, being grand marshal at San Francisco's gay pride parade and going to Vancouver for X2. He said he was impressed with Bes-sai, a "very energetic, on-the-ball, chasing-after-possibilities director." So he agreed to do Emile once X2 had wrapped, despite early reservations over whether he'd be able to play a Canadian. "Frankly, had I not been coming to Vancouver I wouldn't be doing the movie," he admits with typical candour. "It's something that interested me and I happened to be in the area." It gave him great pleasure, he notes playfully, to be able to help Bessai obtain much-needed final financing on the strength of his reputation.

With a laugh, he thanks New Line Cinema and Fox chief Rupert Murdoch and Time AOL Warner for "without knowing it, having helped subsidize a little movie they know absolutely nothing about." As bizarre as it might sound, TOYOTA inn UIUU 0 McKellen says Emile is much like the Lord of the Rings. "This is a new territory and a new way of working for me, but it's a local film. Lord of the Rings was also a local film. Most of the people who worked on it live in New Zealand and most people working on this live in B.C., including (former Oak Bay High student) Deborah. It's a story that belongs to this part of the world, made by people who know this part of the world and there was room for a visitor me." Bom in 1939 in Burnley, a mill town in northern England, McKellen received early encouragement from his mother, a homemaker who died when he was just a boy, and his father, a civil engineer who died when he was 24.

He used to stage plays in a toy theatre they bought him and, after moving to the mining town of Wigan, acted in school plays. The Lancashire lad appeared in even more plays after moving to Bolton and became obsessed with Shakespeare after playing Malvolio at 13 in a school production of Twelfth Night. He also attended summer camp at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he watched legends such as his idol Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Peggy Ashcroft onstage. Training in the repertory system in Coventry and Ipswich after studying at Cambridge, McKellen later worked in London with a who's who of British theatre luminaries notably Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn and Olivier, who invited him to join the National Theatre Company after he made his London stage debut in 1964 in A Scent of Flowers. Scores of awards followed (including a Tony Award for his Salieri in Amadeus on Broadway in 1981) as his career flourished with companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London's Actors Company, which he co-founded.

Intrigued by film, he also successfully ventured down that road without abandoning his theatrical roots, appearing in small films such as Bent (1997), Cold Comfort Farm (1995) and Restoration (1996). In 1995, he won accolades for his chilling portrayal of a fascist villain in an unnamed 1930s European country in Richard Loncraine's radical update of Shakespeare's Richard HI, which he co-wrote. He soon found himself in higher demand after earning critical raves for his uncanny, Oscar-nominated triumph as James Whale in Gods and Monsters Husqvarna CHAIN SAWS Model 136. New, longer-16" bar. Inst I rtnmi'ms rnen LA Aah cci qk rc ALF DECKERS 750 Enterprise Cres.

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Stock D2764A only power locks, Bruce Stotesbury Times Colonist gray hair: "I think if I had picked up the Oscar for playing Gandalf and I know because I had the speech in my pocket that would have been part of my pleasure." At a time many actors his age are winding down, McKellen is raring to go, although he says he's looking forward to returning home to London for a break first. He still periodically performs his autobiographical one-man show A Knight Out, as he did last month as a fundraiser for Vancouver Playhouse. Early next year he'll star in a London production of August Strindberg's Dance of Death, which he performed on Broadway last fall with Helen Mirren and David Straithairn. Playfully breaking into the song Dul-cinea from Man of La Mancha, McKellen says cinematic visionary Terry Gilliam has also asked him to play Don Quixote in Quixote. It is an extravagant, 6ft-delayed dream project that has been plagued with so many problems it inspired Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about the perils of risky epic filmmaking.

As for becoming a movie star late in his career, it's a phenomenon he's still getting used to. "People warned me. They said your life is going to change totally. I didn't know what they meant," he recalled. "They said Gandalf is extremely famous so it brushes off on the actor playing him as well.

It's the same with Magneto. They have multitudinous fans. It's never really happened to me before. It gives you an intimation of how unpleasant it must be to be really famous. But it's a wonderful gift I'm able to bring with me." He says he appreciates being able to meet fans of those films because they are communicating with him about something good and relevant.

Indeed, the actor who has played Shakespearean heavyweights from Hamlet to Macbeth makes no apologies for doing such blockbusters. "The story of the defeat of Sauron is a mighty epic and people enjoy it and think about it. That's part of what good writing and filmmaking is about. And I think X-Men is about something important mutants, people who are different and they find it difficult." He says the X-Men comics and movies appeal to a demographic he's very concerned about "young gay people" as well as black and Jewish filmgoers. After playing Gandalf, McKellen says he's ready to put the wizard thing behind him, however.

When his agent called three weeks before Richard Harris's death with news that the producers of the Harry Potter films had inquired about his availability, he said it never crossed his mind they viewed him as a possible replacement for Harris's Professor Dumbledore. "If that's what they think then I absolutely shouldn't do it because I don't want to be the wizard gay again," he says, adding with a twinkle: "With all due respect to Richard Harris, I've got the better part and it's not over yet so it's unlikely I would want to. But I would certainly like to be in the Harry Potter movies doing something else." Meanwhile, Emile is scheduled to wrap here the day before The Two Towers opens, but that doesn't mean he won't see himself on screen with his fans in Victoria. He says he'll try to make an appearance at a preview screening at the Odeon. While Tolkienites across North Amer-.

ica line up to see him on Dec. 18, McKellen will more likely be watching an inflight movie. That's the day he flies home to London, where Bessai will film him in the Underground wiuYa handheld camera. (1999), a fictionalized account of the eccentric, openly gay British horror film director's final days in Hollywood. McKellen was also lauded for his creepily affecting work in Apt Pupil (1998) as a boozy Nazi executioner-in-hiding blackmailed by a Holocaust-fixated teenager.

Like Whale, McKellen is a Brit who lives and works in Hollywood when not at home in London and who has been openly homosexual since he decided to "come out" in 1998 during a BBC radio broadcast. It hasn't hurt his career much and didn't prevent him from being knighted by the Queen in 1991 for his contributions to the arts. "I'm openly gay but I'm also a war baby and an Englishman." McKellen doesn't see his gay activism as his defining characteristic. "I'm not proselytizing or campaigning or going on a rampage or pushing forward a political agenda, but by just mentioning it in response to an inquiry, some good has been done." And he gets plenty of inquiries from fans gay and straight on his remarkably comprehensive Web site (www.mck-ellen.com), which he started at the behest of friend and Web master Keith Stem. It's an electronic extension of the programs, clippings, photos and writings that he says began to take up too much space in his cellar.

"I'm editing what is basically an ego newspaper," the outspoken actor quips. "It's a wonderful confirmation." Among the issues that stir his passion most is Section 28, legislation brought in under Margaret Thatcher in 1988 that bans the promotion of homosexuality in England. Despite assurances from Tony Blair it would be repealed, it's still there. "Unbelievable!" he sighs, shaking his head. "They still haven't been able to get rid of it." McKellen, a co-founder of England's gay rights lobby Stonewall, also bristles when asked about his reaction to lawsuits launched by Tom Cruise against two men who claimed he was gay.

"Aaargh," says the gaunt, bespectacled actor with a theatrical shudder. "I wish he hadn't done that. He does a real disservice to gay people, I'm afraid. "Not that he's gay himself. That's not the issue.

It's that he thinks his career would be impeded if his fans were made to believe he's ever made love to a man." McKellen doesn't buy Cruise's argument his fans wouldn't accept him as a romantic lead if they believed he was gay. "That's as stupid as saying that now that Tom Cruise is divorced we'll never be able to believe him when he plays a married man," he notes sarcastically. "It's called acting" Indeed, McKellen proved that himself in Michael Caton-Jones's Scandal (1989) when he played John Profumo, the British Defence Minister who was forced to resign after it was revealed he had an affair with showgirl Christine Keeler. McKellen says Cruise and many others in high places in the film industry are behind the times. "I mean, they only discovered there were blacks this year at the Oscars," he quips, a slight, mischievous smile washing over his face as he sips a glass of red wine.

"They didn't even notice that Whoopi Goldberg was black, the woman they'd asked to be the hostess." Recalling Halle Berry's emotional acceptance speech about being the first woman of colour to win a best actress Oscar for Monster's Ball, McKellen says he would have delivered a gay-themed variation had he won for Tlie Fellowship of the Ring. Says Sir Ian, leaning back in his chair running his hand through his wavy AC, Tinted glass, roof rack, stereo. Stock X3366 WAS $26,995 NOW 4 door sedan LX, 4 wheel drive, automatic, silver with grey cloth. ONLY Plus 3rd seating, big wheel tires, P. Windows, white with black leather Stock 3454A only 4 Door 4 WD, 5 spd trans.

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