Monster mash: catching up with actor Ian McKellen

Interview, Nov, 1998 by Graham Fuller

Whale was a visionary sophisticate - his other credits include the 1936 Show Boat - whose grasp of horror's potential for wit, humanism, and the special plight of the outsider has never been surpassed. Shunted aside by Hollywood in his mid forties because he was gay, he retired from directing and became a painter. In 1957, at the age of sixty-seven, he drowned in his swimming pool. Gods and Monsters speculates what kind of relationship Whale might have roguishly forged with a strapping but determinedly straight Californian gardener (Brendan Fraser) in the last days of his life.

GRAHAM FULLER: There are striking affinities between you and Whale - not least your looks.

IAN MCKELLEN: Yes, there's a vague resemblance between us. He wasn't much older than I am when he died, although he was more decrepit. He'd been an actor before he became a director, and we come from the same part of Lancashire and the same social class. And because he was an openly gay man in Hollywood, which is something I've been, too, he immediately interested me.

GF: The relationship between Whale and the gardener in the film mirrors that of Frankenstein and his Monster. He wants him to be something he's not.

IM: Yes. Like Frankenstein, Whale wants to take this man and make him into his friend - though it's bound to go wrong because you can't do that. Biopics are often unsatisfactory in that they fail to relate somebody's work to their life. I think we get over that by telling a witty, ironic story that Whale might have enjoyed telling himself, with characters like the comic maid [Lynn Redgrave] who comes right out of '30s cinema.

GF: The film shows how Whale might have been traumatized by his experiences in the First World War. Do you think those experiences influenced his work in reality?

IM: Yes - and not just his war stories, Journey's End [1930] and The Road Back [1937]. The idea of death and rebirth that you find in his Frankenstein films must have been very potent to him. Like many war survivors, he was probably left with feelings of guilt. I suspect a shadow was cast across his life at a crucial point in his development. How could one ever shake that off?

GF: The man you play in Apt Pupil is another kind of survivor - an executioner from the Nazi death camps. He's also another kind of monster - except you humanize him.

IM: I don't think I ever said to myself it's necessary for anyone to love him, but you see him in a number of situations where his charm is self-evident. A man who survives in hiding for a long time presumably develops a strong shell of normalcy. Away from the scene of their dreadful actions, people can be quite ordinary.

GF: It's an unsettling moment in the film when your character puts on the Nazi uniform. You were similarly attired in your film of Richard III [1995].

IM: Yes, the uniforms are similar - very theatrical. Crudely speaking, the devil has the best tunes. I should add that this doesn't come out of any morbid fascination of mine.

GF: Are you still ambitious?

IM: I need acting much less than I used to. I think that's connected with my public coming out ten years ago.

GF: Did it liberate you as an actor?

IM: At the time, it didn't seem to be such a huge step. But once you say to yourself, "There's no one in the world I wouldn't be honest with, whatever their reaction might be," then you have taken control of your own life in a very healthy way. People have told me I'm a better actor now than I was before.

GF: Gods and Monsters includes that scene from The Bride of Frankenstein when the blind hermit befriends Karloff's Monster. It's a quotation that suggests friendships are possible if people overcome their prejudices.

IM: Yes. It admits that people are complicated and that the complications are worth looking at.