If there’s a Middle Earth MVP of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, Sir Ian McKellen would bestow the honour on the character of Gandalf.
Not that there’s any bias or anything — McKellen’s onscreen wizard just happens to be the catalyst for years of cinematic fantasy that take a final bow with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (opening today).
Gandalf is “organizing the whole thing. He’s the stage manager and the producer and the director and everything else,” the actor, 75, says with a hearty chuckle.
In director Peter Jackson’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, the bearded Gandalf leads a crew including Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) to hurl the One Ring into Mount Doom and keep the land from falling into the evil clutches of Sauron.
And in the three prequel Hobbit films, Gandalf is part of a collective including Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) to take back the dwarves’ kingdom in the Lonely Mountain from the dangerous dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch).
McKellen concedes the latter is not as good a path for the character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels: “I feel a bit more that the Gandalf that everyone knows is the Gandalf of The Lord of the Rings, the man on the high mission who’s going to save the world and is running the whole show.
“Although Gandalf is central because he allows things to happen, in The Hobbit he rather lets the dwarves get on with it and goes off and does his own thing.”
Yet it was still a “tough and melancholy” day for Jackson on McKellen’s last day of Hobbit filming, the director says.
“I sat with him afterward and I said, ‘Ian, it’s all over.’ We had a little cry on each other’s shoulders. I email him all the time, but I’m not actually going to see Gandalf.”
McKellen does get to play two different versions of the wizard over the course of the two trilogies: He’s Gandalf the Grey through the Hobbit films, but in the Rings triumvirate, the character dies during an encounter with a demonic Balrog and is resurrected as Gandalf the White, mainly to make sure Sauron’s armies are defeated.
“When Tolkien kills him off, he can’t do without him and he brings him back, rather like Sherlock Holmes having to be revived,” McKellen says, laughing.
If he’s being honest, McKellen chooses Gandalf the Grey as his favourite mainly because he’s fun.
“He’s more human, although he’s not human. He likes mixing with people, he finds things amusing, he loses his temper, he recovers,” the actor says. “Gandalf the White is a bit of a stick, isn’t he? He’s driven — he’s got just one thing to do, and he gets on with it.”
In a long career that has earned him a Tony Award, a Golden Globe, five Emmy nominations, two Oscar nominations and a chance to battle the X-Men on the big screen four times as the supervillain Magneto, McKellen says playing Gandalf has changed his life.
“Wherever I go in the world, there are friends who know Gandalf and want to say hello, and I enjoy that. They’re usually young people, and it’s been a blessing, really.”
The old magic man might not always be the best role model, though. McKellen was reminded at the London première of Five Armies that Gandalf smokes his pipe an awful lot in the movies.
“It’s odd that I don’t think anybody has objected to that,” he says. “All these kiddies watching their favourite grandfather smoking away! I suppose he’s past redemption.”
