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Scott Mendelsohn: Your empathy. Politics may be about making connections, but often those connections are used to stigmatize, to isolate people we don’t understand, label them as “criminal” or “evil.” As an actor, you use your imagination to understand all kinds of people, not just sociologically but viscerally, in such a way that you communicate to an audience. Ian McKellan: Well, it doesn’t always work like that. In the end there’s a limit to an actor’s ability to affect the world simply by playing parts. You just present the evidence and tell the story and hope it’s understood. When I played Richard III, when I played Iago, or when I played Macbeth—these are great, great parts often labeled “evil” by critics and audiences. “He’s an evil man from Shakespeare.” My feeling is that Shakespeare’s philosophy allows you to know that these aren’t evil men, but rather they are frail men. These are human beings writ large, and their faults are also writ large. They have too much power for their own good, and if you look carefully you can see the origins of their evil. SM: So he doesn’t actually enjoy the act of murder. IM: No. In fact he isolates himself from murder. But the reason he does what he does…It’s very complicated with his mother. She says to him that she’s robbed him of her love because she hated the way he looked. He was deformed. That’s a very clear exposé of why he turns that hatred back on the world: he’s not loved. Now that’s a rather 20th Century view, isn’t it? —BOMB 65, 1998

Scott Mendelsohn: Your empathy. Politics may be about making connections, but often those connections are used to stigmatize, to isolate people we don’t understand, label them as “criminal” or “evil.” As an actor, you use your imagination to understand all kinds of people, not just sociologically but viscerally, in such a way that you communicate to an audience.

Ian McKellan: Well, it doesn’t always work like that. In the end there’s a limit to an actor’s ability to affect the world simply by playing parts. You just present the evidence and tell the story and hope it’s understood.

When I played Richard III, when I played Iago, or when I played Macbeth—these are great, great parts often labeled “evil” by critics and audiences. “He’s an evil man from Shakespeare.” My feeling is that Shakespeare’s philosophy allows you to know that these aren’t evil men, but rather they are frail men. These are human beings writ large, and their faults are also writ large. They have too much power for their own good, and if you look carefully you can see the origins of their evil.

SM: So he doesn’t actually enjoy the act of murder.

IM: No. In fact he isolates himself from murder. But the reason he does what he does…It’s very complicated with his mother. She says to him that she’s robbed him of her love because she hated the way he looked. He was deformed. That’s a very clear exposé of why he turns that hatred back on the world: he’s not loved. Now that’s a rather 20th Century view, isn’t it?

—BOMB 65, 1998

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