Existential Men Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart

The veteran stage actors and friends double up on Broadway

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Neither feels the need to apologize for the pop entries on their august résumés. "As an audience," says McKellen mellifluously, "I like fantasy movies, I like musicals, I like variety shows, I like Tony Bennett--it's all the same to me. The fact that some things are more popular than others doesn't make them better, and it certainly doesn't make them worse." Stewart echoes the thought in his stentorian baritone: "There is something that connects all these works. Tolkien is based on a remarkable, complex piece of 20th century English literature. Marvel's X-Men comes from the most significant comic-book series there has ever been, full of serious thoughts and societal themes. Star Trek, exactly the same."

With Captain Picard, Stewart hit the pop gusher first (he balked at the initial six-year contract and agreed only after "everyone assured me it would be a failure"), but McKellen was well ahead of him in stage renown. Stewart, 73, grew up in Yorkshire, studied acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and spent years at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) playing small roles and understudying before he made much of a mark. McKellen, 74, got a scholarship to Cambridge and was playing lead roles at the RSC and National Theatre by the 1970s (and won a 1981 Tony Award for playing Salieri in Amadeus).

"The first time I saw Ian, he was playing Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing," Stewart remembers. "Good lord," says McKellen--that was in 1965, and he was a relative small fry in the stellar Franco Zeffirelli production.

"I was instantly envious of his extraordinary good looks, not to say beauty," says Stewart. "He had a glamour about him."

McKellen: "You sure it wasn't Derek Jacobi?"

They traveled in the same circles, learned from the same people. "It was a great time to be a young actor in England," says Stewart. "Because the intellectual power of directors like Peter Hall and Peter Brook were really beginning to have an impact. Actors were being told to think." After his first read-through for Henry IV, Part 1, in the small role of Sir Walter Blunt, Stewart remembers the director stopping to ask each actor to discuss his character. "I realized, He's going to come round to me--and I don't have an idea in my head! Well, I went home afterward, and I was determined that I would never ever be put on the spot like that again. I would do my homework."

The system that nurtured them, however, is eroding. "You can't do as I did," says McKellen. "Go to Sheffield, to Manchester, to Liverpool, and spend an entire year with a company, working on high-quality plays with very experienced actors." Public funding for theaters has dried up; many have closed. But also to blame, McKellen argues, are the antilabor policies of Margaret Thatcher, which reduced the power of the actors' union by ending a requirement that actors work nearly a year before getting full membership. "It was an enforced apprenticeship," says McKellen. "Now young actors can work in the West End or be in a film without any training whatsoever."

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