Sir Ian McKellen has revealed that the late Star Wars actor Alec Guinness once pleaded with him to abandon his activism for gay rights. The 86-year-old actor, who publicly came out as gay in 1988 and co-founded the LGBTQ+ lobby group Stonewall a year later, recounted the encounter in a new interview with The Guardian.
McKellen said Guinness took him for an Italian lunch in Pimlico, where the Obi-Wan Kenobi star expressed his disapproval of McKellen's political involvement. 'He had heard about my work to establish Stonewall – a lobby group to present to the government and the world at large the case for treating UK lesbians and gays equally under the law with the rest of the population,' McKellen said. '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. Advice from an older generation, which I didn’t follow.'
McKellen said the memory of the lunch resurfaced while watching 'Two Halves of Guinness', a play that hints at Guinness's latent bisexuality. Biographies published after Guinness's death in 2000 suggested he was privately bisexual, and one claimed he was charged with a homosexual act in a public lavatory in 1946, giving his name as Herbert Pocket from Great Expectations to avoid scandal.
McKellen has previously expressed regret about not coming out earlier. In 2015, he said he would have been 'a different person and a happier one' had he done so before 1988. He is set to reprise his role as Gandalf in the upcoming film 'The Hunt for Gollum'.
