Sir Ian McKellen has revealed that the Star Wars actor Alec Guinness once “pleaded” with him to not actively campaign for gay rights.
The veteran star of stage and screen, best known for his role as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings franchise, publicly came out as gay in 1988, and a year later was one of the co-founders of the LGBTQ+ lobby group Stonewall. But his role in public campaigning for gay rights was met with disdain by Guinness, he has claimed.
In a new interview, McKellen said that he was taken to lunch by Guinness around the same time, where the star – who originated the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi in 1977’s Star Wars – expressed his unease with his immersion in politics.
“He took me for an Italian lunch in Pimlico, where we chatted about this and that until he brought up the real reason for his invitation,” McKellen told The Guardian. “He had heard about my work to establish Stonewall – a lobby group to present to the government and the world at large the case for treating UK lesbians and gays equally under the law with the rest of the population.”
McKellen continued: “He thought it somewhat unseemly for an actor to dabble in public or political affairs and advised me, sort of pleaded with me, to withdraw. Advice from an older generation, which I didn’t follow.”
The 86-year-old added that he had remembered the lunch only while watching Two Halves of Guinness, a new play in which actor Zeb Soanes takes audiences through episodes in Guinness’s life and career. Included in the play are allusions to Guinness’s bisexuality.
“This all came back watching the current tour of Two Halves of Guinness, a solo show which hints at Sir Alec’s latent bisexuality in a way that would have upset him, I suppose,” McKellen said.
In 2001, two biographies on Guinness stated that while the actor was married to the actor and playwright Merula Silvia Salaman from 1938 until his death in 2000, he was privately bisexual – a fact that was known only to his close friends and colleagues.
One authorised biography claimed that Guinness had been charged with performing “a homosexual act” in a public lavatory in 1946, an incident he had managed to keep out of the public eye. When arrested, he had given his name as Herbert Pocket, the Great Expectations character he played in a film released that same year.
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While McKellen is today arguably one of the most famous gay actors in the world, he has expressed regret in the past about not coming out publicly far earlier than he did.
In 2015, he said he would likely have been “a different person and a happier one” if he hadn’t waited until 1988. “I regret and always shall that I didn’t see the significance of coming out at a much earlier date,” he said. “Self-confidence is the most important thing that anybody can have.”
The actor, who is reprising his Gandalf role in a forthcoming return to Middle Earth titled The Hunt for Gollum, recently praised Johnny Depp after working with him on new film Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol.
“He’s effervescent, funny, irreverent, serious – all at the same time,” he said. “It was a bit of a love fest, really. I fell in love with him. He’s very obliging to his fellow actors. [There was] a wonderful feeling on the set.”
