Ian McKellen relishes Machiavellian role in new film ‘The Critic’

He may have masterfully played Gandalf, wizard and leader of the Fellowship of the Ring, but even Ian McKellen has been on the receiving end of a bad review.

In The Critic, out in theaters Friday, he gets to turn the tables, playing a newspaper man who savages “bad performance” with unrestrained vitriol in London on the eve of World War II.

“Where the savagery comes from is what I had to work out,” McKellen told NPR’s Leila Fadel. “I think it’s because central to his life is the fact that he’s gay at a time when … it was against the law for two men to make love in the 1930s in the U.K.”

McKellen was born in 1939, a few years after the setting of the film but at a time when being gay was still criminalized. He came out as gay in 1988, when he was nearly 50 years old.

Speaking about his character in the film, Jimmy Erskine, he added: “If you spend your life being ill treated by the laws of the land and by other people’s attitudes to your sexuality, is it any surprise that perhaps when it’s possible, you take revenge on other innocent people seem to be?”

Faustian bargain

The tale winds around the thorny relationship between Erskine — inspired by real-life critic James Agate — and stage actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), whose acting he has relished in destroying on paper for years.

Incensed, the actress accosts him on the street, angrily stating: “You’ve compared me to livestock, creatures of the sea and an extinct bird. You’ve said my voice is fluting, grating, girlish and manly. You’ve described me as plump and emaciated, which is damn you?” She then quotes one of Erskine’s reviews to him: “‘Her Mrs. Halstead is glamorous but ungainly. She doesn’t seem to know how to walk.’ How to walk?! You’ve been dishing out at me for a decade and now it’s going to stop.”

And to that, Erskine replies: “Oh, are you retiring?” It’s just one of many zingers that fill a script penned by Patrick Marber (Notes on a Scandal) and directed by Anand Tucker. McKellen shines and perhaps outshines other brilliant actors like Alfred Enoch, who plays Erskine’s lover, and Lesley Manville, in the role of Land’s mother.

After the newspaper’s new owner threatens Erskine’s job, Land reluctantly agrees to help him keep his post through a devious blackmail scheme. Like any Faustian pact, she ends up with the short end of a high-stakes bargain.

‘There’s nothing else I’d rather do’

McKellen said he drew on his personal experience before coming out as gay decades ago. Before then, there were no older actors he could look up to who were publicly open about being gay.

“I wasn’t deep in some closet, but I was not totally honest and didn’t talk to the media about it,” he said. “You were kept quiet by the fact that your nature, God-given you could say, was against the law. … I know a couple of people just a bit older than me who were in prison for having made love.”

In one scene, Erskine uses his wit and acerbic rhetoric to confront a Blackshirt — a supporter of the British Union of Fascists — who uses a homophobic slur against him. “May I return the compliment and say how splendid you look with your badges and crests and crisp black shirt. Did you iron it yourself?” he tells the Blackshirt.

McKellen, who’s been active behind the camera and in the theater, also relates to his character’s despair whenever he sees something on stage that isn’t as good as he believes it should be.

“He takes that personally because he loves the theater,” said McKellen, who was twice nominated for an Oscar. “That’s another reason why he can be extremely negative … always in the hope that next time, they will have improved.”

The 85-year-old actor was sidelined from his role in the London production of Player Kings after an onstage fall in June. But he said he has no intention of stopping anytime soon.

“I’ll carry on until the knees give way or the memory gives way or the mind goes. There’s nothing else I’d rather do with my life than that. Much better to wear out than rust out, as they say,” he said.

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.