EDGE Interview: Director Anand Tucker Channels Ian McKellen's Dark Side for 'The Critic'

Filmmaker Anand Tucker – known for films like "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (2003), which he produced, and "Shopgirl" (2005), which he directed – took the helm for the film adaptation of Antony's Quinn's 2005 novel "Curtain Call."

Working from a script by Patrick Marber – who was nominated for an Oscar for his adaptation of Zoë Heller's "Notes on a Scandal" – "The Critic" finds out actor Ian McKellen in fine form, inhabiting a character named Jimmy Erskine, a brutal theater critic whose reviews were executed like a blood sport. Feared by actors and adored by the reading public, Erskine's eloquent and erudite discourses strike David Brooke (Mark Strong), the new owner of the newspaper Erskine has long written for, as too much. The paper is due for a refresh, both in content and in staffing, in order to boost circulation. It's 1937, fascism is on the rise in England as well as in Europe, and right-wing modes of thought are de rigeur.

But that's just the half of it. Erskine is a barely closeted gay man who frequents a cruisy park and employs his much younger lover, Tom (Alfred Enoch), as a secretary. When he's arrested for "public indecency" – that catch-all charge that was once leveled at anyone suspected of being gay – it looks like Erskine's career is due for an abrupt end.

But Erskine is clever, and he's desperate. He hatches a blackmail scheme that involves a struggling actress named Nina Land (Gemma Arterton). The plot is as ruthless as it is amoral, and McKellen has great fun demonstrating the darkness and fury by which a gay man of his time might well have been possessed. But he also has a softer side, one that Nina brings out of him in her blend of ambition and haplessness.

McKellen creates a villain that's as complex and evil as any he's portrayed before – and he's portrayed plenty of villains, from Magneto in the "X-Men" movies (a role he last revisited with 2014's "Days of Future Past") to a Nazi mentoring a young boy in 1998's "Apt Pupil," and even his turn as Freddie Thornhill, one sharp-tongued half of a deeply dysfunctional gay couple on the British TV series "Vicious."

Tucker joined in a Zoom call from his home in London, announcing his whereabouts with a tone that suggests he finds being in the city anything but exciting. When this correspondent mentioned having gone to London for fun on weekends while living in a market village called Saffron Walden, he brightened.

"When I was a youngster in the '80s, I used to go there," he said, "because my girlfriend was a Tibetan Buddhist. There was an ashram up in Saffron Walden run by a Tibetan lama. I used to go and have terrible gruel for breakfast, and then have to sit in a cold room on my haunches for hours with miserable Germans."

That, your EDGE correspondent has to admit, doesn't sound out of character for Saffron Walden. Read on to see what else Tucker had to say about making the movie, working with McKellen and the rest of the cast, finding the last '30s-esque parts of London, and the ways in which 2024 echoes 1937.

EDGE: Have you heard from Sir Ian since he took that nasty tumble?

Anand Tucker: Yes, yes. I saw him on Monday night, in fact, at the European premiere of "The Critic."

EDGE: He is so good in everything, but, to borrow a phrase, when he plays bad he's better! Was it fun to coax evil Ian McKellen out to play?

Anand Tucker: It was! I think Ian has created one of the great British screen characters with Jimmy Erskine. It's a remarkable performance that's unbelievably entertaining, and yet deeply nuanced. He's not afraid to show you all his vulnerability, all the darkness, the terrible, dark shit that's brewing inside... the venality, the fear, the cowardice. It's extraordinary.

EDGE: Jimmy Erskine does everything with gusto, whether he's eating, smoking, or cruising for sex in a park. But I got the sense that's not out of exuberance so much as rage.

Anand Tucker: You're absolutely right. I think it's contained in the script, as well as it's embedded in Ian, because Jimmy Erskine and Ian McKellen, for the majority of their lives, have had to hide who they truly are because [being gay was] fucking illegal. You could lose everything in a heartbeat and be thrown in prison, or worse. Jimmy's great thing is truth: truth in art, be true to yourself. And yet, somehow, he has to do all of that while hiding who he really is. There's an interview that Ian gave when he finally came out, where the interviewer asked him, "Has it changed your work?" and Ian said [something like], "Absolutely. Suddenly there was no need for the mask, and a whole different range of emotions and truths were available to me."

[For Erskine], that anger, that resentment, bitterness, darkness, anger at the world – that has gone sour inside him. And, in a way, it asks the audience to confront the question of, "What would you do?" Because in some way or another, we've all been in a situation where you can do something that can benefit you and your family at the expense of someone else.