It didn’t take much to persuade Ian McKellen to sign on for “The Da Vinci Code.” In fact, the British actor couldn’t think of a single reason why he should turn down the opportunity to co-star in director Ron Howard’s big-screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s controversial and best-selling novel.
And so, when the film opens Friday, McKellen will be on view as Sir Leigh Teabing, the Holy Grail expert whose knowledge comes in handy after the murder of an elderly curator at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The crime turns out to be the tip of the iceberg of a possible conspiracy involving the Catholic Church, long-buried secrets about the life of Jesus and a clandestine religious sect that will stop at nothing to protect its interests.
McKellen is only one of the big names in “The Da Vinci Code.” Tom Hanks stars as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbology professor out to unravel what happened at the Louvre. Audrey Tatou plays Sophie, the slain curator’s granddaughter, who joins forces with Langdon, and Paul Bettany is Silas, an albino monk who’s also an assassin. Others in the cast include Alfred Molina and Jean Reno.
“There’s quite a lot of depth to Sir Leigh,” McKellen says, “in that he’s not what he seems, and perhaps we shouldn’t go any deeper into it or be more specific than that. But the few things you were given are that he’s an obsessive, living abroad, living on his own, that he was crippled and he was rich. There was a lot about him that you could delve into and use to answer questions as to why he came to be what he was.
“I think we delve into that, and perhaps you couldn’t say that of all the characters in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ that they were all as interesting as Sir Leigh,” McKellen continues. “And because we had a rehearsal with the cast and Ron and Akiva Goldsman, the screenwriter, in Paris, before we actually started filming, I was able to delve into that in a way that we might have were we rehearsing a play. So there was plenty of meat there.”
He added that working with Hanks also was appealing. “Basically it’s a big, big American movie, but there’s just one American actor on the screen and the rest are European. Most of the movie takes place in England – in London, indeed – and I was able to live at home and travel 15 minutes to location, which is unheard of.”
Brown aficionados consider the 2003 book a masterpiece, a life-
changer, while detractors find it a potboiler, a passable reworking of Brown’s previous novel, “Angels and Demons” (2000), to which it is a sequel. They also argue that, like his other stories, it favors plot twists over character development. And then there are those who’ve deemed it heretical.
Speaking by telephone from a Hollywood hotel, McKellen says that he rather liked the book.
“I wanted to get to the end of it,” the actor says, “because Brown held out the possibility of defining the indefinable, namely what is the Grail and where is it and why is it? And your mind is working away at that. It suggested that there are conspiracy theories and that people are prepared to live and die for the truth of the situation.
“Of course what is being dealt with is very important,” McKellen continues, “because it’s at the heart, the basis of one of the great organized religions. To indicate that they’ve organized themselves a little too far is an interesting theory. … But as an atheist I can’t get quite as excited about the details.”
McKellen, who will turn 67 on May 25, is no simple atheist. One of the entertainment industry’s highest-profile homosexuals – he came out publicly in 1988 – he has other issues with the church, though he dismisses them with a sly laugh.
“Well, they have their issues with me,” he says. “I don’t worry about them. It’s they who have the problem. … I think the church has very harmful views on homosexuality which it will have to come to terms with eventually.”
On May 26, a week after “The Da Vinci Code” debuts, McKellen will return to multiplex screens in “X-Men: The Last Stand.” The third installment in the comic-book-
based franchise finds mutant rebel leader Magneto (McKellen) at odds with integrationist Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his X-Men in the face of threats that include a possible cure for mutation and the transformation of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) into the unstoppable Dark Phoenix.
“The cure, the cure,” McKellen says dramatically. “Can you be cured of your mutancy? Can you be cured of the color of your skin? Can you be cured of your sexuality? This is the political resonance the plot has got.
“‘X-Men’ is much the most interesting of these sorts of movies,” he says. “The demographic that Marvel has for the comic, for ‘X-Men,’ are young blacks, young Jews and young gays, specific groupings who feel disaffected or are made to feel at odds with society because their differences are pointed out by society.
“They relate strongly to the idea of mutants who have powers which society is nervous about and can’t quite cope with.”