Top 100 Ian McKellen Quotes
#1. Very, very rare that you do a job knowing that the audience is desperate for you to do that job. Most films you make don't get released, is the fact.
Ian McKellen
#2. If I say often enough that I'm going to be in 'King Kong,' I'm hoping that Peter Jackson will take the hint.
Ian McKellen
#3. Success in the movies has pushed me to places I didn't know I was allowed to go.
Ian McKellen
#4. I headed out to have a breather at the stage door, dressed in my tramp costume. I had my bowler hat between my feet and there were passers-by, and one of them turned back and said, 'Do you need help, brother?' And $1 fell into my hat!
Ian McKellen
#5. I remember Tom Stoppard saying to me when I came out, 'I feel so sorry for you, because you'll never have children.' These days I would say, 'Well, why not, Tom?'
Ian McKellen
#6. If I have any audience, they can know that anything I am in, I would go see, with the expectation of being really satisfied.
Ian McKellen
#7. Splendid architecture, the love of your life, an old friend ... they can all go drifting by unseen if you're not careful.
Ian McKellen
#8. I'm fortunate to be famous for two rather imposing characters like Magneto and Gandalf.
Ian McKellen
#9. The one thing you can ask, I think, is that actors get paid a living wage. I would like it if all the repertory theatres that currently exist could do that. It would make a huge difference.
Ian McKellen
#10. What's nice for me, having identified myself for years as being rather shy, is now, wherever I am, in public, there tends to be a friendly face who's pleased to see me, and I like that.
Ian McKellen
#11. Until I came out, my acting was all about disguise, and thereafter it became about telling the truth.
Ian McKellen
#12. I increasingly see organized religion as actually my enemy. They treat me as their enemy. Not all Christians, of course. Not all Jews, not all Muslims.
Ian McKellen
#13. Try and understand what part you have to play in the world in which you live. There's more to life than you know and it's all happening out there. Discover what part you can play and then go for it.
Ian McKellen
#14. The strength of British theatre should be that these actors in their middle years know what they're doing and are good at it. Not rich, not famous, but making a living.
Ian McKellen
#15. What I particularly like about Broadway is the camaraderie and the friendship of other people in other shows. Everybody knows you're opening and cares about you. There's a real village atmosphere.
Ian McKellen
#16. In any human-rights campaign, everybody must do what they can.
Ian McKellen
#17. 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.
Ian McKellen
#18. My reaction to 3D is subtly. Things don't come out at you, but rather you - The audience come into the film.
Ian McKellen
#19. Doing some of the 'Lord Of The Rings' press junkets got a bit claustrophobic.
Ian McKellen
#20. I don't think many people will re-read 'The Da Vinci Code.'
Ian McKellen
#21. It's an interesting but useless bit of information that every single character in 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' wears a wig, and many of them wears a prosthetic - false ears, feet, hands. In my case, nose.
Ian McKellen
#23. I'm brilliant at cooking my stepmother's scrambled egg recipe. The secret is to put eggs, butter, milk, and seasoning together in the saucepan, and to keep stirring with a wooden spoon under a low heat until the preferred consistency is reached.
Ian McKellen
#24. 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.
Ian McKellen
#25. 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.'
Ian McKellen
#27. I certainly wouldn't define myself as a northerner. I'm not even really sure what that means. I've lived in London for 50 years. I wasn't born here, but I have spent most of my life here. So I don't make much of it, to be honest. I'm just myself.
Ian McKellen
#28. I don't have Gandalf the White's certainty about everything.
Ian McKellen
#29. I learned that coming out was crucial to self-esteem.
Ian McKellen
#30. I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.
Ian McKellen
#31. It is so painful watching yourself act, particularly because you can't do anything about it, it's all done and dusted.
Ian McKellen
#32. 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.
Ian McKellen
#33. 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.
Ian McKellen
#34. Gandalf is in Middle-earth to keep an eye on everybody, and that can be a rather serious matter.
Ian McKellen
#35. If you've been in a film that's seen by millions and millions and millions of people, you're more likely to be recognized for that than for your theater performances, which were seen by considerably less people. Why would I get upset by that?
Ian McKellen
#36. 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.
Ian McKellen
#37. Capitalism offers you freedom, but far from giving people freedom, it enslaves them.
Ian McKellen
#38. 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.
Ian McKellen
#39. I'm an eccentric English actor, and there's a lot of us around.
Ian McKellen
#40. 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.
Ian McKellen
#41. The press like to talk to actors. They mustn't be surprised when actors talk back to them.
Ian McKellen
#42. Television can take anything. It can take the most exaggerated of storytelling forms.
Ian McKellen
#44. You always think that 70 is the end of the road: 'Somebody died when they were 73; good life'. You're closer to death, and you better make sure you don't waste too much of your time doing things you don't want to do. No point in saying things you don't believe in.
Ian McKellen
#45. I was a shy gay man at a time when it was illegal to be gay.
Ian McKellen
#46. Why live outside the US? Do you want health care or safe food products or democracy or something? They're all overrated. Stay for the excellent cable TV.
Ian McKellen
#47. To know you are in the company with people who love and care for each other, as well as for whatever they are working on, is almost essential.
Ian McKellen
#48. You might be surprised by how interested young people are in older people.
Ian McKellen
#49. Most actors are not rich - they are very poor indeed. What keeps them going is that they just love the job.
Ian McKellen
#50. Thanks to every gay person in public and non-public life who has come out.
Ian McKellen
#51. I don't really like being with people my own age for long periods, because all we talk about is our decrepitude, how the world is changing for the worse even though it isn't.
Ian McKellen
#52. It is really, really wonderful that in your old age you are protected by specialists who understand your problems and sort them out for you. Well, isn't that what we all need?
Ian McKellen
#53. I love the Broadway audiences, who relish live drama and don't hesitate to display their enthusiasm.
Ian McKellen
#54. Gandalf the Grey was always the guy I prefer. Gandalf the White was driven to do a particular job, whereas Gandalf the Grey is a bit more humane.
Ian McKellen
#56. Some relationships get easier as you get older, depending on what sort of person you are. I don't think I've got any better at them.
Ian McKellen
#57. 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.
Ian McKellen
#58. I quite like it when I'm on the Tube and people offer me their seat. Sometimes I take it. The other day I was offered a seat by a pregnant lady. I thought, 'That's going a bit far.'
Ian McKellen
#59. 'Lord of the Rings' was about saving the world, big time, big duties.
Ian McKellen
#60. The first film role I deliberately chose to play after I came out was a raging heterosexual, John Profumo.
Ian McKellen
#61. There's something wholesome about the theatre.
Ian McKellen
#62. Actors are merely the medium through which a story happens.
Ian McKellen
#63. I'm not someone who wears shades all the time and ducks into a darkened car in case I'm recognized - that would be absolute misery.
Ian McKellen
#64. I'm only an actor. I'm not a writer. I'm not going to leave any legacy. All I've ever done is learn the lines and say them.
Ian McKellen
#66. Gandalf's a good guy, and it's a good part. He says the right things, he believes the right things. An actor can have fun with it.
Ian McKellen
#67. Most of the time when you do a job, a play or a film, you're wondering, "Will there be an audience?"
Ian McKellen
#68. I always walk up the escalator on the Tube, and I live in a house with a lot of stairs, and that's good exercise, but you need more than that.
Ian McKellen
#69. I'm a latecomer to popular TV. This is rather new to me, being in a sitcom. It's been an ambition of mine.
Ian McKellen
#71. Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.
Ian McKellen
#72. The wonderful thing about modern medicine is that so many of these complaints that used to signify old age and decline can be coped with.
Ian McKellen
#73. I'm not experienced enough, or certain enough of my acting on the screen to say to a director, "You are wrong, I am right. I will only do it this way." I could never feel that, I wish I could be absolutely certain. But on the stage, it's different. I know where I am on the stage.
Ian McKellen
#74. I used to comfort myself when I became an actor that it was a useful job, entertaining people. And it was important to do it as well as you possibly can.
Ian McKellen
#75. Anyone in public life who comes out, comes out primarily for themselves, and their life is immediately improved. That's what happened to me.
Ian McKellen
#78. Anyone who thinks Peter Jackson would fall for market forces around him rather than artistic integrity doesn't know the guy or the body of his work.
Ian McKellen
#79. There are still times in my life where I pull back from being totally honest, and I can't imagine a single straight person who would understand that.
Ian McKellen
#80. One school invited me down, as two pupils had come out, and the headmaster didn't know what to do about it. I said, 'How many students here are gay?' and he said, 'Just these two.' Clearly not. 'How many gay members of staff have you got?' He had no idea. And this was a concerned man.
Ian McKellen
#81. I think New York audiences are some of the brightest in the world, and certainly the most enthusiastic.
Ian McKellen
#82. There are some tremendous actors in the U.K. who have been knighted, and I've spent much of my life admiring many of them, like Laurence Olivier. So it's very flattering to be in their company.
Ian McKellen
#83. I think the point to be understood is that we're all different. I've never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn't go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, 'This is the way you should act.'
Ian McKellen
#84. 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.
Ian McKellen
#85. 'The Da Vinci Code' is the most popular book of our times.
Ian McKellen
#86. I was brought up in industrial south Lancashire, down the cobbled road from where LS Lowry (1887-1976) lived and painted.
Ian McKellen
#87. When I came out, I told my stepmother Gladys, and she just said she had known for years and was glad I wasn't lying anymore.
Ian McKellen
#88. 'King Lear,' I've been seeing all my life. I mean, the great actors of my lifetime ... to join their company, as it were, by playing a part that's challenged them, is one of the great joys of being an actor who does the classics.
Ian McKellen
#90. When you grumble about a taxi being dirty, people your own age will absolutely agree with you, whereas younger people say, 'You should be so lucky to have a taxi - I walk to work!' So I have lots of young friends, who fortunately don't treat me as a guru, a person that knows all the answers.
Ian McKellen
#91. The battle going on over gay marriage in America reveals an awful lot. The Bible belt - people hate gay people. Because the Bible tells them? No, the Bible tells them an awful lot of things that they ignore.
Ian McKellen
#92. What's upsetting about an autobiography is that the final chapter is always missing. I mean, you want the death, don't you?
Ian McKellen
#93. That's the imagination that happens in the theater. That imagination is translated in film by the film magicians and all the technology.
Ian McKellen
#94. In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.
Ian McKellen
#95. I think I've become more modest as the years have gone on.
Ian McKellen
#96. I often get mistaken for Dumbledore. One wizard is very much like another.
Ian McKellen
#97. I'm not being offered a constant stream of wonderful parts with wonderful directors that would keep me away from the theatre. When they turn up, I do them.
Ian McKellen
#98. Even now, there are young actors who want careers as romantic leading men, and the best thing is not to reveal you're gay.
Ian McKellen
#99. When I appeared in 'Coronation Street,' I lived in Manchester and enjoyed it very much.
Ian McKellen
#100. When I was playing Gandalf, I didn't think, 'Oh my dear, I'm playing a 7,000 year old wizard,' because I've never met one, and I don't know what they're like.
Ian McKellen
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