From his extensive Shakespearean roots to his knockout *X-Men *and Lord of the Rings roles as Magneto and Gandalf, Sir Ian McKellen boasts a prowess so refined that he's now playing a role, The Prisoner's power-hungry villain Number Two, previously inhabited by not one actor but 17.
Yet McKellen insists this isn't your grandmother's Number Two.
"There's no point in wondering how am I going to measure up to the other Number Twos, because it's just a different script altogether," the soft-spoken knight explained to Wired.com after addressing an auditorium of TV reporters at Hollywood's Universal Hilton earlier this year. "My man is called Number Two, because the character was originally called Number Two. But he is Number One."
Spoiler alert!
Although McKellen later backs off the reveal, it's nevertheless obvious that he acted as one of the prime movers behind AMC and ITV's reboot of Patrick McGoohan's surreal '60s series. McKellen's participation as Number Two (or is that Number One?) enticed Jim Caviezel to step into McGoohan's giant-sized shoes as the heroic Number Six.
(For more on Number Six, read Wired.com's interview with Jim Caviezel.)
Due to air in November, The Prisoner will share more secrets Friday at an 11:30 a.m. Comic-Con panel.
What got McKellen so excited about this Prisoner? Sir Ian says that it was neither McGoohan nor the original series that prompted his involvement, but Bill Gallagher's superlative script, which interrogates everything from psychiatry and domesticity to surveillance and technology.
The result is a powerful, engaging story filmed, as McKellen explained, in "the asshole of Namibia."
__Wired.com: __Thanks for agreeing to this interview. *The Prisoner *is one of my all-time favorites.
Sir Ian McKellen: Really? How did you come to be a fan of it?
Wired.com: I watched it with my grandmother. She had a thing for McGoohan, and now so do I.
Sir Ian McKellen: He was a charismatic actor. But then so is Jim. I think we're all right with him. But with Patrick, it was all on his face. That look that said, "What is going on?"
Wired.com: From the clip I saw, you make a great Number Two. You have the Leo McKern laugh.
Sir Ian McKellen: I worked with Leo before in 1964. He was Australian and had one glass eye. It was a trick of his to take a spoon to bang it on his eye to attract waitresses' attention.
Wired.com: Did it work?
Sir Ian McKellen: I've seen it work. But there's no point in wondering how am I going to measure up to the other Number Twos, because it's just a different script altogether. My man is called Number Two, because that character was originally called Number Two. But he is Number One.
__Wired.com: __That seems a bit, uh, different.
Sir Ian McKellen: And then even as I said that, it's not quite true. It's a very difficult thing to talk about without beginning to disentangle it, and I don't want to do that. But it's a fabulous project. Number Two is very ironic. At times, he's very loving and bewlidered, because he's confused. He's not convinced that he's doing the right thing, because it causes him a lot of pain. And that's the sign of a mature script. Jim was saying in an interview that it is easy to see Number Six is right and that Number Two is a dreadful man. But then, in the next scene, one can see it from a different point of view.
Wired.com: The original Number Twos mostly seemed to be company men and women who personified a banal evil. But today there is a tendency to make villains more complex.
__Sir Ian McKellen: __Well, Shakespeare's villains are fabulous, because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do. [Laughs] They've got reasons for what they do, and they've got sometimes fantastic language. It's also difficult to make up your mind about Magneto, isn't it? But if you're playing the part, of course, you can't take that into account. You just play the part as seen through the character's eyes, and he does what he has to do. What other people think of him is their own affair.
See also:
R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner's Television Visionary
The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon for 21st Century
Wired.com: Are you attracted to complex villains, in that sense?
Sir Ian McKellen: I wouldn't really want to play a part that was simply all bad. There are characters like that, but I don't really find them interesting, because I don't meet many people like that. People who are truly horrible are often the most interesting people in the room. You look at them and just say, "Why?" But there's no question who the hero is here: It's Number Six.
Wired.com: Number Two is more complicated in the reboot, because now he has family.
Sir Ian McKellen: He's got a wife, and a son. You find out a lot more about him. The fact that he's got a family is absolutely central to the fact that there is a village. And about that, I can't say another word. [Laughs]
Wired.com: Hardest. Interview. Ever.
Sir Ian McKellen: [Laughs] Normally, you would have seen an episode or two and then we could talk about it. But they haven't finished it. They'll probably start with episode six and work their way back to episode one.
Wired.com: Did your involvement with this project have anything to do with the original series?
Sir Ian McKellen: Nothing to do with it. It was the quality of the scripts. What I liked about the original was its style. It was witty, it had its tongue in its cheek. There was a lot of black comedy in it. And that curious location fitted with the oddity of the stories, and some of the acting. They just had that style, which was absolutely right for the story that they were telling. But it would be inappropriate for the story that we are telling.
Wired.com: How do you feel this version is of its time, the way the other was of its time?
Sir Ian McKellen: I think it's spot-on. I think you'd have to say that this story takes place a little bit in the future, when notions of surveillance have gotten more intense, ambitious, and intrusive. Our Prisoner takes off from that point. We may have gotten used to it in one way or another, but this is surveillance beyond what we currently have.
Wired.com: How about current geopolitical concerns? Do they bleed into this iteration the way that civil liberties, Vietnam and the summer of love bled into its predecessor?
Sr Ian McKellen: Well, it's obvious that screenwriter Bill Gallagher is fascinated by psychiatry. And he's also fascinated by the way we currently have to lead our lives, in terms of being observed through our credit cards, what we buy, what we look at. Cameras everywhere are recording how we look and what we do in public. All of these things are played on, but he's not analyzing the whole of modern life. He doesn't get into the specific nature of politics, for example, and I don't think there is even a government agency in The Prisoner. It's also not a treatise on global warming.
Wired.com: Or the so-called war on terror?
Sir Ian McKellen: No, but it's easy to relate it to that, in a sense. But principally, no. It's about domestic life in the West.
Wired.com: As lived in a German village located in Africa?
Sir Ian McKellen: Yes. Well, it's a bit unnerving that this place exists. Is it the Village? It's basically Swakopmund. The architecture is constantly catching your attention. It's not beautiful or comfortable. It's surrounded on one side by the inhospitable Atlantic and on the other side by an inhospitable desert. Before the Germans colonized it and called it Swakopmund, which is literally "the mouth of the Swakop River," the locals called it -- what's the polite way to put it? -- "excrement opening." That's "asshole," to you and me. The asshole of Namibia.
Images courtesy of AMC
See also:
- Q&A: Can Jim Caviezel Fill Patrick McGoohan’s Prisoner Shoes?
- R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner's TV Visionary
- The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon for 21st Century
- Prisoner Cast, Swag Bust Loose at Comic-Con
- First Glimpse of The Prisoner Reboot Is Agonizingly Short
- The Prisoner's Sonic Shadow Looms Large
