Ian McKellen on Retiring, Gandalf and Playing a Villain in ‘The Critic’ –

Jack McGuire

When it comes to a career that’s netted him two Oscar nominations, a Tony, six Olivier Awards and a reputation as one of the preeminent Shakespearean actors of his generation, Ian McKellen usually has critics exhausting the superlatives. But he’s not immune to the rare bruising notice, and when that happens, he calls his friends.

“The best thing is to let everyone know that I’ve read it and they needn’t pussyfoot around it,” he says. “I know that I’ve been chastised.”

For his latest role in “The Critic,” it’s McKellen who is delivering the blistering assessments as Jimmy Erskine, an acid-tongued theater reviewer who yields a corrosive influence over a struggling actress named Nina Land, played by Gemma Arterton. He’s a Mephistophelian figure — one who exchanged his moral compass for great orchestra seats.

“Often the devil has the best tunes and the best lines, and it’s fun to play an outrageous man who clearly has some emotional problems,” McKellen says during a Zoom interview from his London home. His gray hair is a thicket of indifference, he’s nursing some stubble and chain-smoking, but despite his informal appearance, he still seems so elegant. Blessed with a stentorian tone that makes him perfect for classical heroes, every one of McKellen’s asides and utterances arrives with an air of profundity.

“The Critic” will have its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where the producers will try to sell it to a studio. If the film lands a deal, McKellen’s performance will have a lot to do with it.

“It was an intriguing script, tending toward melodrama,” he says. “If the audience doesn’t believe in what we’re doing, then they might find some of the action a bit overwrought. It was a tricky balance to strike.”

As we talk, I notice that hanging behind him is a small snapshot of Laurence Olivier, outfitted in a bowler hat from the film “The Entertainer.” “He meant everything to my generation,” McKellen says. “He was the big ever-present spirit over the British theater.”

There’s a scene in “The Critic” where Erskine talks to Land about the ineffable quality that performers like Olivier are blessed with — the rare ability to bring a character, with all its contradictions and foibles, to glorious life. He describes their “capacity to conjure the sublime” and ascribes it to “the courage to give of the self entirely.” McKellen, who has embodied heroes and villains, great kings and lowly strivers, kindly wizards and mutant overlords, so memorably over the years, has it too. But he’s as hard-pressed as Erskine to describe how he pulls off these transformations. He wasn’t, he notes, formally trained, arriving in the theater by way of Cambridge, where he majored in literature.

“I’ve never learned Meisner or any technique of acting,” McKellen says. “I didn’t go to drama school. I’ve often wished that I did have a foolproof approach to how to prepare. Each play or movie stands by itself for me. And every time I begin with this terror of just ‘Here we go again, making the same mistakes.’”

For McKellen, it all starts with the text. He pores over his scripts, hoping to excavate clues about his characters’ motivations while sketching their backstories. Then he begins to think about exterior elements — how they move, the clothes they wear, the inflection of their voice.

“So much work happens before Ian ever gets in front of a camera,” says Bill Condon, who directed McKellen in four films, including “Gods and Monsters,” which won him an Oscar nomination. “At first, it’s a lot of sitting around talking about the screenplay, and then he starts to build from the outside in. And the conversation becomes all about props and blocking before he starts homing in on something more precise and expressive to find that thing that unlocks it for him.”

McKellen relies on sensitive directors to nudge him toward these epiphanies. “I’m very dependent on someone from the outside saying, ‘This is what I’m receiving from you,’” he says. “I would define a good director as an honest one who says, ‘Look, this is mostly not working. But, Ian, at that moment where you decided not to sit down, you were absolutely the character.’ If I can then remember that moment and what it…