Everybody’s a critic, they say. But it’s hard not to be mean-spirited when you live under oppressive laws that restrict and forbid your very identity.
Alfred Enoch and Ian McKellen in ‘The Critic’.
Sean Gleason/Greenwich Entertainment/Everett
That’s the duality played by Ian McKellen in new film The Critic. Set in 1934 London, director Anand Tucker’s film features the legendary actor (renowned for both his traditional Shakespeare performances and his portrayal of nerd icons such as Gandalf and Magneto) as theater critic Jimmy Erskine, famous for his vitriolic reviews. But he doesn’t stop at words. As the plot unfolds, Jimmy also resorts to blackmail and murder when his career and livelihood are threatened.
Rather than an attack on critics generally, McKellen tells Entertainment Weekly that he wanted to empathize with Jimmy’s unfortunate historical situation.
“I’m certainly not playing this as any sort of revenge on critics. I related to Jimmy because he’s gay and trying to imagine what it would be like to be gay and living such a public life at a time when your very basic nature is criminalized,” McKellen says. “You’re inevitably leading two lives, and if Jimmy eventually behaves appallingly, well, the law has behaved appallingly against him, hasn’t it? Consciously or not, he’s taking revenge. I think that makes an otherwise rather melodramatic story ring true. [The 1930s] were a melodramatic decade.”
Since coming out in 1988, McKellen has been a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ rights, championing many social movements and organizations across the world. These days, with gay marriage legalized in the United States and most other Western countries, the days of criminalization can seem far behind us. But McKellen knows firsthand that those dark decades are closer than they appear in the rearview mirror.
“I can remember those times,” McKellen says. “I had friends who were sent to prison for making love, so I didn’t have to do any research. It was all inside myself, just waiting to be brought to the surface. When I was playing Jimmy, as is often the case when you play someone who behaves appallingly like Richard II or Macbeth, judging the character isn’t very helpful when you’re inhabiting the part. I see the film and I think ‘Good God, what a dreadful man.’ But it didn’t feel like that when I was playing him. I thought he was just getting on with his life.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s an upside to this character as well. Playing Jimmy, McKellen gets to unleash some truly withering witticisms.
“The devil usually has the best tunes, and [screenwriter] Patrick Marber gave me some really wonderful lines,” McKellen says.
The Critic is in limited release now.