Ian Mckellen Quotes
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When I was playing Gandalf, I didn't think, 'Oh my dear, I'm playing a 7,000 year old wizard,' because I've never met one, and I don't know what they're like.
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I certainly don't disparage someone whose attitude towards their work is utterly different from mine - that's up to them.
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Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up... Theater of all sorts.
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I've had enough of being a gay icon! I've had enough of all this hard work, because, since I came out, I keep getting all these parts, and my career's taken off. I want a quiet life. I'm going back into the closet. But I can't get back into the closet, because it's absolutely jam-packed full of other actors.
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I'm a latecomer to popular TV. This is rather new to me, being in a sitcom. It's been an ambition of mine.
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If we just made one movie, 'The Hobbit,' the fact is that all the fans, the eight-, nine- and 10-year-old boys, they would watch it 1,000 times. Now, they've got three films they can watch 1,000 times.
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Elijah looks angelic but his beauty of spirit is what makes his Frodo leap out of the screen. Unalloyed goodness is one of the most difficult attributes to act.
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Why live outside the US? Do you want health care or safe food products or democracy or something? They're all overrated. Stay for the excellent cable TV.
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Some directors don't tell you that it's not your fault, so you get increasingly depressed that you're not delivering what's required, and then you discover it's not you at all, it's something in the background that's out of focus.
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I am going around British secondary schools, as a gay man talking about my life, and encouraging schools to get rid of homophobic bullying and to care for their gay members of staff and their gay students.
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2D looks so flat. Well, it is, of course, it's flat. But 3D isn't. And for an adventure story that takes you into a long-distant, fictional world, it's ideal, I think.
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To know you are in the company with people who love and care for each other, as well as for whatever they are working on, is almost essential.
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Acting is no longer about lying. It's now about revealing the truth. People are at ease with me now. Honesty is the best policy.
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We are very lucky to be men because women have a terrible time getting older parts. It's much more difficult.
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It is so painful watching yourself act, particularly because you can't do anything about it, it's all done and dusted.
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I think it's one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It's another thing to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It's not that they [my significant others] don't want to be identified as gay, but that they don't want to be identified as ... with me.
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My memory of 3D movies is Fernando Lamas in a swashbuckling movie. And I suppose it had been the fifties, in which swords came out at you, bullets came out at you, things were thrown into the auditorium, apparently. All that sort of cheap, "Oh, look at us, we've got 3D" isn't in the film.
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That's the imagination that happens in the theater. That imagination is translated in film by the film magicians and all the technology.
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In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.
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Kids are coming out earlier and earlier - some, as young as twelve now - and schools need to take that into account.
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I have been reluctant to lobby on other issues I most care about - nuclear weapons (against), religion (atheist), capital punishment (anti), AIDS (fund-raiser) because I don't want to be forever spouting, diluting the impact of addressing my most urgent concern - legal and social equality for gay people worldwide.
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It may be my rather puritanical upbringing at odds with my inborn laziness that makes me feel guilty at the end of the day, unless I am able to point at some achievement. But this need be no more impressive than cooking a meal or going for a long walk.
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The demographic of our audience is young. It also contains a high proportion of black, Jewish and gay people, who have all been encouraged by society to think of themselves as oddities or mutants. I hope that's why X-Men chimes with them - it's certainly why I was attracted to the idea in the first place.
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There are directors, and I think this is true of all directors, it would be true if I was a director - If the actor didn't want to do what I was suggesting, I would let him do it his way, and then I would say to him, "Just give me one where you do what the director wants", and that, of course, is the take that's used.