You might be surprised by how interested young people are in older people.
From Ian Mckellen
The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.
Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.
People who are truly horrible are often the most interesting people in the room. You look at them and just say, 'Why?'
Will I miss Gandalf? Well, I don't miss him, because people are constantly coming up to me mentioning him and talking about him, so I don't feel that I've lost contact.
Every time you work is a challenge. There's a constant worry about it, and it's a side of acting I don't like.
In the U.K. there is still work to be done, particularly in schools, stopping the homophobic bullies in the playground and introducing unbiased discussion on gay issues in the classroom.
In any human-rights campaign, everybody must do what they can.
In Singapore, Malcolm X type of activity would be extremely difficult because the government can be very harsh on lawbreakers.
When I went to lobby Nelson Mandela while the post-apartheid constitution was being drafted, I asked him to endorse making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexuality. I'd been warned that he might giggle if I mentioned homosexuality.
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