Existential Men Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart

The Tiny conference room with the plastic chairs hardly seems worthy of the two sirs who walk in the door: Sir Patrick Stewart, almost dashing in a black leather jacket over a plaid flannel shirt, and Sir Ian McKellen, looking more like a rumpled English professor with his orange sweater, flowing gray locks and stubble of beard. Trailing them, it seems, is virtually the entire canon of Western dramatic literature: the great Shakespearean roles–Lear and Macbeth, the Richards and Henrys–and the classics of Ibsen and Chekhov. They crossed paths at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s and first acted together in a 1977 production of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

But it took mutant superpowers to really forge a friendship. When both were cast in the 2000 comic-book movie X-Men–Stewart as the telepathic Professor Charles Xavier, McKellen as his chief nemesis, Magneto–they had a lot of time in between the special effects to get to know each other. “In those kinds of movies, you spend much more time sitting in your trailer waiting to act than actually acting,” Stewart says. “And we had these sumptuous luxury trailers. So we would hang out and talk.”

Now they’re the mightiest double act on Broadway, appearing together in two modern classics, performed in repertory: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. The twin dose of existential desolation–Beckett’s allegory of two tramps in a barren wasteland and Pinter’s enigmatic tête-à-tête between two hazily connected gentlemen in a London townhouse–was the brainchild of director Sean Mathias. He had directed the two in Godot (they pronounce it God-oh) four years ago in London and wanted to take it to New York. But Stewart had a yen to do No Man’s Land, the 1974 Pinter play first enacted by the legendary John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Mathias suggested doing both. McKellen “was very sniffy” about the Pinter play at first, says Mathias, and Stewart “needed a little persuasion to do Godot again.” But both came around.

They’re two of the last lions of a revered generation of British stage actors, a group that also includes Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon, Ben Kingsley and Judi Dench. All spent years in the major British repertory companies, undertook the great classic roles and maintained their allegiance to the stage even as they made forays into movies and television.

None, however, have managed to cross the line between classical and pop, high culture and mass audience, more successfully than these two. Stewart became the idol of fanboys everywhere by playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation and four feature films. McKellen’s performance as the white-bearded wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and now The Hobbit) has made him the go-to guy for fantasy films looking for sagelike elders with plummy British accents. “I get offered a lot of parts that require long beards,” he notes. “I’ve turned down God on a number of occasions.” And both will be back in summer for a fourth installment of their superhero franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past.

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.”

Liberal politics is another bond between the men. McKellen, who came out as gay in 1988 (he and director Mathias lived together for eight years), has been active in Britain’s gay-rights movement. Stewart, who grew up in a left-wing family, used to enjoy dropping the word socialist into dinner-party conversations in Beverly Hills just to get a reaction. Yet both of them accepted knighthoods (McKellen in 1991, Stewart in 2010), calling it a mark of respect for their profession–admission to an esteemed fraternity that includes Olivier, Gielgud, Guinness and so many others. (Several prominent actors, like Albert Finney and Paul Scofield, have turned it down.)

“I don’t approve of titles. I think they get in the way,” says McKellen. “I do however approve of medals for public service, and that’s how I choose to look at it.” There was also a political calculation. “I was in the throes of challenging the government to change their attitude to laws which put gay people at a disadvantage. And other actors [said to me], ‘Please, we need a knighthood. Because when a knight knocks on a door of a government office, it has to open.’ “

Their sojourn in America has taken their friendship in interesting new directions. In September, McKellen conducted the vows at Stewart’s wedding–to Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell. He isn’t exactly sure if he’s qualified (he’s been ordained online by the Universal Life Church), but it may have opened up new career prospects. McKellen recently got an offer of $1 million from “someone very famous” to officiate at his wedding.

“But I had to dress up as Gandalf,” he says. “And Gandalf, of course, doesn’t accept these occasions.”