Ian McKellen knows when someone’s two cents isn’t even worth a penny. Even when that someone is Obi-Wan Kenobi.
While answering submitted questions for The Guardian, McKellen was asked about the worst piece of advice he’d ever been given. He launched into a story about being approached backstage by British actor Alec Guinness in 1979, who was then playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy, and invited to dinner.
McKellen said he “stupidly declined” that invitation, which came while he was performing in the play Bent, a drama about the treatment of gays in Nazi-led Germany. When the two actors finally met up a decade later, McKellen says Guinness spoke to him about the work he had done to establish Stonewall, the largest LGBTQ+ rights advocacy organization in the UK. According to the Lord of the Rings star, Guinness tried to dissuade him from doing anything political.
“He thought it somewhat unseemly for an actor to dabble in public or political affairs and advised me, sort of pleaded with me, to withdraw,” McKellen recalled. “Advice from an older generation, which I didn’t follow.”
McKellen said that the incident had been top of mind after seeing the current tour of Two Halves of Guinness, a play about the late actor’s life, one of several shows this year marking the 25-year anniversary of Guinness’s death. The play also deals with rumors around Guinness’s sexuality in a way that McKellen says the late screen legend probably wouldn’t love.
“This all came back watching the current tour of Two Halves of Guinness, a solo show which hints at Sir Alec’s latent bisexuality in a way that would have upset him, I suppose – Zeb Soanes’ immaculate impersonation notwithstanding,” McKellen told the Guardian.
Some Guinness biographers have written that the actor was arrested, charged and fined in court for a gay act that happened in a Liverpool bathroom in 1946, per The Daily Beast. One biographer said he avoided publicity around the incident because he told officers his name was Herbert Pocket, a character he played in Great Expectations.
Australian actress Coral Browne had once publicly said, in 1965, that Guinness had been “cottaging again,” a term used in the U.K. to mean cruising, which prompted Guinness to storm into her dressing room and threaten her with legal action, per the Times. Browne corrected the record by saying she had meant that he was decorating a cottage.
When he’s not confusing Charli XCX’s pronouns, McKellen is still doing all that he can for LGBTQ+ rights, including trying to get closeted Hollywood actors to come out and championing all-trans Shakespeare adaptations.
