Sir vs. Sir

Ian McKellen Is into TV, but Not Game of Thrones . . . Yet

The veteran performer talks Anthony Hopkins, The Dresser, and the challenges of finding the right project.
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Courtesy of BBC.

As recently as 10 or even 5 years ago the first collaboration between acting titans Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Anthony Hopkins would have taken place in a much different arena. On one of London’s prestigious stages, perhaps, or maybe in a glossy Oscar-season-ready film. Instead, these two knights of the acting realm chose to tilt at each other for the first time in a new TV adaptation of The Dresser, a World War II-set backstage drama that was first a Tony-nominated play and then a 1983 Oscar-nominated film. The two-hour production is a feast of classically trained scenery chewing at its finest and The Dresser—which aired first on the BBC and will debut in the U.S. Monday, May 30 on Starz—may be just the beginning of truly prestigious cable drama.

The Dresser takes place over the course of one night as a regional Shakespeare repertory company struggles to put on a production of King Lear while Germans bomb the city from above. The star of the play, Sir (Hopkins), is ill and in denial about reaching the end of his life but his assistant—McKellen’s titular dresser, Norman—is in even more denial and struggles to hide his boss’s dementia and failing health from the rest of the crew. Emily Watson is Sir’s fed-up and neglected wife, Sarah Lancashire shines as the stage manager who has carried a torch for him for years, and Edward Fox—who also appeared in the 1983 film—gets a touching monologue as the Fool to Hopkins’s Lear. The caliber of acting and meta-layers of the material make this filmed play—because that’s essentially what it is—a completely different animal from the stage musicals (live or otherwise) that are all the rage on network television.

This revival of The Dresser was originally meant for the stage. That was playwright Ronald Harwood’s original intention, anyway. But it was Sir Anthony Hopkins—who not only decisively left the theater several decades ago, but has proven a passionate TV junkie—pushed for the production to go to television. As his co-star Ian McKellen points out, there is a richer history of filmed plays in the U.K. “I was brought up on plays on television,” he told Vanity Fair over the phone. “They don’t happen anymore very much. To be able to do a broadcast without any commercials as you would in the theater, and the story starts and it goes through and it ends, it’s likely to hold your attention in a very positive way.”

As McKellen points out, this TV version of The Dresser is much closer to a staged production because it never takes the action outside the theater. As is often the case with plays on-screen, the 1983 film version added outdoor settings to try to open the action up. “In the film, of course, they goes outdoors,” McKellen says. But in the Starz version you only “see them in the context of the theater where they virtually live, and I think that claustrophobia is very much part of the play, and of course is retained in the TV version.”

According to McKellen, people have been trying for years to entice him into appearing in a production of The Dresser. But he was always asked to play Sir, the older role and always said no because “the original production had rather done it.” But McKellen gives Hopkins the credit for luring him in. “The suggestion was made, I think it was perhaps Tony Hopkins who made it, that he should play Sir and I should play the dresser, a part I’d never thought of playing because Tom Courtenay [star of both the original film and stage productions] was so brilliant.” McKellen said he contacted Courtenay before signing on to take the part to say “he would always be the first dresser.” The role has always been that of a much younger man, but McKellen says aging up the part was the “main reason for me at least agreeing to do the script. You feel that they’ve been together from time immemorial.”

This new TV production—which is all about the love of theater—was so theatrical that it re-ignited Hopkins’s desire to appear onstage. “It was very touching at the end of the film, Anthony said, ‘I think we could do a play together,’” McKellen said. “He foreswore the theater but I hope before we both lose our faculties, we do find something.” But McKellen—who has had enormous career success lending theatrical gravitas to fantasy and comic-book franchises—says he’s at a loss to find a worthy project. “Anthony did say why don’t we do Waiting for Godot together? I had to point out that I’d played Estragon 440 times, so I can’t go back to that, I’m afraid. The trouble is when you want to work with someone of your gender and your age, there aren’t that many existing scripts that you can work on. Someone would have to write something for us.”

But before these acting legends appear again together, on stage or otherwise, Hopkins will again be seen on television in HBO’s much-delayed and hotly anticipated sci-fi drama Westworld. McKellen himself has been appearing with another acting legend, Derek Jacobi, in the niche ITV series Vicious. But despite his love for The Dresser, McKellen said he wasn’t all that keen to dive further into the world of prestige cable drama. “Let the offer come and then I’ll decide, but I’m not really chasing producers for a bit within Game of Thrones or something.” That’s too bad. After all his years running with Hobbits and Orcs, he might fit right in.