Los Angeles Times Interview : Ian McKellen : Coming Out for an Actor Can Be Soul Reviving--and Tough

History often recalls a season when a group of people moved in concert to create change. Last week, tens of thousands of gays and lesbians came to New York to remember their season of change--to mark the uprising 25 years ago that sparked the modern gay-rights movement.

On June 27, 1969, a few dozen individuals--mostly drag queens, male hustlers and college boys--fought back when police raided a dance bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn. The riots that followed inspire gays nationwide to demand an end to repression and prejudice, and emboldened them to live and work proudly in every part of American society. Nowhere is the gay contribution more evident than in the arts--particularly in theater, where openly gay actors, writers, set designers, producers and directors are flourishing. Great works dissecting gay themes, such as Tony Kushner’s Pultizer Prizes-winning “Angels in America,” and Paul Rudnick’s “Jeffrey” receive wide acclaim. Yet, it has been a difficult struggle--in Hollywood, gay and lesbian actors still face possible loss of employment if the truth of their private lives ever came out.

Two months after Stonewall, British actor Ian McKellen starred at the Edinburgh Festival in Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II,” a sensational gay role few actors were willing to risk. Local authorities tried unsuccessfully to ban the show because two men kissed on stage. McKellen, then 30, was himself a closeted homosexual. It was not until 1988 that he came out.

Now 55, Sir Ian--as he has been known since 1991, when he became the first openly gay actor to be knighted--has become an important gay activist in Britain, raising money for an AIDS hospice and helping to found a gay-rights lobbying group. A brilliant Shakespearean actor educated at Cambridge University, McKellen has said--and demonstrated--that he is not a gay performer but rather an actor who is proud to be gay.

He has taken a range of parts in the last five years: he revived “Bent,” the 1979 play about gay concentration-camp victims; he toured in America as “Richard III;” he did Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” and Dracula in music video for the Pet Shop Boys. He also spent time in Hollywood: tackling a role in “And the Band Played On,” about the AIDS epidemic, as well as smaller roles.

An enormously engaging raconteur with startling blue eyes, McKellen spoke in his dressing room last week in Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, where he was appearing in “A Knight Out,” a one-man show he devised especially for the cultural festival accompanying the Gay Games. With only an hour to go before curtain time, still out of costume in a work shirt, blue jeans and purple high-tops, McKellen spoke calmly yet eagerly about the great strides of gays in the theater and how far they still had to go in film.

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Question: Many recent plays by gay writers emphasiz e similar themes -- of coming out, of gay pride, of caring for the sick. After this initial burst of venting and expression, what themes do you expect playwrights who are seeing the world through a prism of gay life will move on to?

Answer: I don’t know. There have always been gay playwrights. Very few of them have written about being gay. The first one to do it was Christopher Marlowe, who I quote extensively in my show. But throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, gay playwrights like Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward never acknowledged in their work that they had ever fallen in love with another man.

That’s the cruelty of society’s repression--that people as independent and spirited as they were didn’t dare speak openly about themselves and their work. And it’s only very, very, very recently this has happened. There are still famous playwrights alive that don’t want to be identified as gay and disguise their sexuality not only in public interviews but in their writings. So the people we’re talking about now are really the exception.

. . . You just have to look at each individual’s work. Martin Sherman’s play “Bent” predates all of these and you look at Martin’s writings since. He’d written other plays about the gay experience before that and every play he writes has a gay character in it. It’s very difficult for Martin to imagine the world without a gay person in it. But Martin is just a civilized person who happens to be gay and everything will be filtered through that experience. He’s not a proselytizing writer like Larry Kramer is. Larry Kramer writes plays . . . to focus people’s attention on political issues that he’s lived through and he tells them in a strong autobiographical way. I expect Larry will always go on doing that. So it’s difficult to look at themes, you just have to look at individuals . . . .

Q: Are gay playwrights perhaps talking to each other too much? Are their themes universal enough?

A: There is a divide. Some are so excited about being able to do it--that’s the entire focus of their artistic invention. But you can compare it with Jewish artists. There used to be a very strong Jewish theater that, after all, had a different language to it--Yiddish. It doesn’t exist in the same force today, but there are many openly Jewish performers and writers. Those people can be in stories that appeal to everybody and write stories that appeal to everybody--but told with a Jewish sensibility which is sometimes definable and sometimes not.

I think the same thing is true of gays. Why would the world cut itself off from the gay point of view which, I think, often centers on, as the Jewish does, a certain sort of humor. But one wouldn’t expect all Jews to have the same view of the world and therefore all Jewish writers to be the same . . . .

Q: Since you’ve c a me out, has anything in your art changed -- the way you approach a role, the way you look at a play?

A: Well, of course, I wouldn’t be doing this show, five years ago. This is only the second show I’ve ever written, the previous one, “Acting Shakespeare” there were a couple of hints that I was interested in the topic of homosexuality but I didn’t relate it openly to myself . . . .

I’ve always thought that the most important attribute an actor could have was self-confidence--to be prepared to make a fool of himself; to be prepared to examine himself in public or in the rehearsal room; to make mistakes and confess things about himself and explore himself and generally cut himself open for people to have a look at and relate that experience to the character that he’s playing.

That takes a certain amount of bravery and self-confidence and self-assurance. But if at the same time you’re busy hiding the most central parts of your personality--not so much from the people you’re working with, which I never did in my case, but from the people who come to see you or to the people to whom you talk about your work. That’s at odds with this self-confidence I’m talking about.

So I’m not surprised when people tell me I’m acting better and that my emotions are closer to the surface, and I’m more in touch with them . . . .

Not telling the truth really hurts your soul and if you leave it to as late as I did, than you’re permanently scared by it. But I feel there is an easing up in my acting. If it’s better, more truthful, I wouldn’t be surprised, but it’s difficult for me to judge.

Q: Is there a difference when an actor comes out from when a set designer or a director comes out? Is it more difficult for an actor because of the public aspect of his job. If we all knew Rock Hudson was gay would he have been as successful opposite Doris Day?

A: If you look at the films now and you know he’s gay do you still like them? Of course. It’s a play--it’s all fantasy anyway. But, I guess it’s true that the issue comes at the point of delivery of the work and then is when the conspiracy arrives. Then the hiding is decided upon. Then the lies will be written; and they’ll be written by producers and publicists and press agents and journalists--the people who have nothing, frankly, to do with the work, only to do with the selling of it. And these people are out of touch and get in the way, frankly, in all sorts of ways . . . . They’re telling lies in order to sell a lot of tickets and to sell a lot of products and the assumption is that we must persuade the world that everybody is the same therefore everybody will like whatever it is we’re selling.

Q: Do you differentiate between how gay actors are accepted in Hollywood and Broadway?

A: Absolutely. We’re just beginning to see that it’s OK on Broadway. It’s all easing up wonderfully well. But not in television, not in Hollywood. Because they’re appealing to a much larger audience. They’re appealing to the lowest common denominator. And that includes prejudice.

So when we see “Angels in America” filmed you can bet your bottom dollar most of the actors will be straight. And they will be very clearly saying they’re straight. It would have been incredible if “Philadelphia” had been acted by a gay man.

It had to be Tom Hanks to reassure us about it. Doesn’t “Angels In America” make “Philadelphia” look so old fashioned? There was only one openly gay person attached to “Philadelphia”: the writer. Everybody else was straight. But that’s why Hollywood is always behind the times, bless its heart. It likes to think it’s somehow right at the beating heart of the nation. But it’s always behind.

Q: What if an openly gay actor had played the Tom Hank’s role. Would “Philadelphia” have been as popular?

A: Yes. And it would have made that actor a great star. And, of course, once he was a star, Hollywood would have been so pleased with itself and they would be running around looking for more openly gay actors who could be in other movies. What these silly agents don’t realize is the first young actor of talent who comes out and stars in a movie and is a hit will be the most famous actor in the world and make a fortune for his agents and his managers and producers and the studio. It will be ground-breaking, history-book stuff.

They should be looking for this actor right now instead of telling people, as they are doing as we speak, “You’re gay that’s fine with me, boy, but I want you to have a girlfriend. I don’t want you to talk about your sexuality. You will be unemployable.” . . . These producers are out now. These studio heads are out now. These agents are out. They shouldn’t be telling their actors to stay in.

I know English actors who are out in London and in the closet in Los Angeles. I know a 50-year-old actress who has been out in the stages doing benefits, saying “I’m proud to be a dyke” in public. Now she’s gone to Hollywood and is trying to have a career there and she’s being told suddenly to be straight.

Q: Part of what you’re acknowledging then is that when you came out in 1988 you were making a decision about limiting your future in Hollywood?

A: I haven’t stopped playing straight characters in movies since I came out. But I’m not playing romantic parts. That’s what they think the problem is: Will you believe a gay actor playing Romeo, who in his private life fancies Mercutio and not Juliet?

Everyone loved John Gielgud playing Romeo. They loved me playing the part. What did they think? I didn’t go around saying, “I’ve got a girlfriend now.”

. . . . I get very angry about this because people who are living, privately, openly gay lives but in public say they’re not gay are convincing people who would be sacked if they were gay in their school or in their job that they are extraordinary and they must keep quiet about it and that there’s something to be ashamed of.

And those people in public life who do that are hypocrites and I don’t care whether they’re politicians or actors or whatever. They really mustn’t lie. They can be private but they mustn’t lie. It’s bad for them and it’s very bad for the world and it’s very unkind for an awful lot of people. And I don’t think they understand the world, and I think they underestimate the audience.