Ian McKellen is still doing interviews for his latest movie The Critic, in between reading Prince Harry’s Spare and continuing his recovery from a theater accident this summer. What happened to our dear Gandalf on stage? He fell. Yes, I’ve been gleefully making the Gandalf references when writing about Sir Ian. I don’t think he minds so much, given he recently called Lord of the Rings “the great unexpected joy of my career,” but I don’t mean to ignore or disrespect his extensive other work, either. It seems Entertainment Weekly was faced with the very same conundrum, as they recently acknowledged that they “couldn’t conduct a complete conversation about ‘The Critic’ without mentioning Gandalf.” Sir Ian was an amiable wizard, as always, and even confirmed something LOTR director Peter Jackson said over a decade ago: yes, Sir Ian did listen to a recording of J.R.R. Tolkien to develop the voice for Gandalf. But it was bigger than just imitating the voice; don’t take him for some conjurer of cheap tricks.
Of all the performances in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the wizard Gandalf has long resonated the most with both fans and newcomers to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. He is the only cast member from any of the big-screen Tolkien adaptations to receive an Oscar nomination for his acting and is also one of the few actors (and certainly the only main cast member) to carry over into Jackson’s prequel trilogy of The Hobbit films. More recently, McKellen has even expressed interest in possibly returning to the role for the future films in development by Warner Bros.
Why does McKellen’s Gandalf stand so tall, even as other Lord of the Rings adaptations are appearing on screen? Perhaps it’s because the actor channeled Tolkien himself. In a 2013 interview, Jackson said that McKellen based his performance on the author’s own voice and mannerisms. So when Entertainment Weekly recently caught up with McKellen about his new film The Critic (now playing in theaters), we asked him if that part was true.
Indeed it is! Listening to Tolkien’s voice both shaped McKellen’s depiction of Gandalf, and assured him that the adaptations were in keeping with the author’s original intent.
“We found a recording of Tolkien reading a bit of The Hobbit. It was very useful to hear the smoky voice — very English, rather professorial. Well, he was a university teacher!” McKellen tells EW of Tolkien, who died in 1973. “It was encouraging to me because he was not acting it particularly well, but the idea of it being heard out loud appealed to him, because that’s what he was doing. It’s not that big of an extension from the audio to making a movie, and of course he sold the Lord of the Rings film rights. So unlike some of his family, he was very happy to think of them as films, although he never saw our version, of course.”
McKellen has had a long and illustrious career over several decades of acting on both screen and stage, but his work in The Lord of the Rings took him to a new level of recognition. After all, we couldn’t conduct a complete conversation about The Critic without mentioning Gandalf, and that’s true of many people McKellen meets.
“I was just doing my job and suddenly everybody knew about it,” McKellen says. “That level of attention was unusual and I’m very lucky. I’m a rather shy person, but I can go into a room of strangers these days and there’s bound to be at least one person who wants to have a word with Gandalf.”
“I was just doing my job and suddenly everybody knew about it.” That sounds more humble hobbit than worldly wizard to me, am I right?! Sir Ian strikes me as really genuine in his gratitude and recognition of what a blessed career he’s had. Personally, I get the feeling he’d still be calling himself lucky as an actor even if LOTR never happened for him, down to the breadth of his stage work alone. But he’s been very gracious with the colossal fame that role has brought him. And he’s not kidding when he says people want to have a word with Gandalf, as he travels on the road that goes ever on and on. Just last year Sir Ian ran into a man on a birthday pub crawl who was dressed as Gandalf, and congenially took a photo with the aspiring wizard. Yet Sir Ian is also firm with his boundaries, clarifying when necessary that no matter the price, “Gandalf doesn’t do weddings.” This wizard cannot be bought!
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