LONDON — LONDON (AP) — Ian McKellen is listening to his inner critic.
It’s beating him up for not finishing out his latest theater role after he fell off the stage during a June performance of “Player Kings” and spent three nights in the hospital.
“Emotionally, I feel guilty and ashamed, you know, quite irrational because it was an accident. And it could have happened to anybody,” he says.
The actor, 85, says it could have been a “great deal worse” if he hadn’t been wearing padding to portray the rotund Sir John Falstaff during the adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” plays at London’s Noel Coward Theatre. While his fractures and chipped vertebrae are healing well, though, McKellen can’t shake the negativity of leaving the production early.
“You suddenly abandon all your mates who are putting on the show and you feel something’s come to an end prematurely,” he says.
But, he says, rumors of his imminent demise were definitely premature.
“I got the impression that dozens of friends wanted to come and say hello that, actually, they wanted to say goodbye. They thought I was on the way out,” McKellen tells The Associated Press, adding with a laugh: “So I very determinedly always open the front door and run up the stairs and show that I’m not going anywhere!”
Although he’s not onstage, McKellen can be spotted at the theater in “The Critic,” a thriller set in the West End of 1930s London that’s in cinemas Sept. 13. This time, he’s in the audience, as gay newspaper writer James Erskine, who can make or break a career with a wicked turn of phrase in an era when homosexuality is illegal. Written by Patrick Marber and based on Anthony Quinn’s novel “Curtain Call,” it co-stars a host of British talent like Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, Romola Garai, Ben Barnes and Lesley Manville.
McKellen spoke to the AP recently about his love of the theater, relationship with critics, the future of Gandalf and going back to work. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
McKELLEN: I miss the routine. When I first started out, it was a great joy to me that when everybody else was taking time off at the end of a busy day, the actors were gearing up, ready to start theirs — that there was something about being an actor that was separate from the rest of the population. But that was probably because I was hiding the fact that I was gay or not talking about the fact that I was gay. It felt good to be different.
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