Sir Ian McKellen wishes he'd spoken to his dad about being gay: 'There would have been no moral judgement'

Sir Ian McKellen has opened up about his family life in a new BBC interview, expressing his wish that he had been able to tell his father that was gay before he died.

In a conversation with Amol Rajan, the Lord of the Rings and X-Men actor recalled growing up in Wigan, where he and his family moved shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

In 1988, the now-82-year-old came out publicly in a BBC radio interview, going on to co-found LGBT+ rights charity Stonewall the following year.

During the new interview, Amol asked Sir Ian if he had ‘the conversations that you needed to have with your father Dennis before he died’, to which he responded: ‘No. I didn’t talk to him about being gay.’

‘Do you wish you had?’ the journalist asked, as Sir Ian responded: ‘Of course.’

He continued: ‘He’d been to see me in my first show in the West End, I’m always glad of that. And three weeks later in a car crash he’d died.

‘The idea that he couldn’t have coped with the fact that his son was gay is inconceivable to me, even though I’m not aware that we had any gay friends or that he’d ever thought about it or that it had any impact on his life. Therefore it might have come as some sort of surprise to him, but there would have been no moral judgement.’

When questioned if he believed his father would have accepted being gay, the two-time Oscar nominee answered ‘yes’.

‘He’d have loved you for who you are,’ Amol remarked, as Sir Ian responded: ‘As my sister did.’

Speaking further about his sister Jean, who died in 2003 and was five years older than him, he said: ‘When I came out to my sister, she said, “Oh I wish you’d told me years ago because I always wanted to talk to you about it.”

‘So much as I present an idealised version of my family life as a kid, there was one thing missing, which was that I don’t remember enough conversations about things that really mattered.’

During an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show last year, Sir Ian shared how coming out publicly as gay improved his work, saying that it made ‘everything better’.

‘It changes your life utterly. I discovered myself,’ he said, adding: ‘And everything was better. My relationships with my family, with friends, with strangers, and my work got better as I wasn’t hiding anymore.’

Amol Rajan’s interview with Sir Ian McKellen is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

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