Ian McKellen’s assistant, cook, and masseur, a lithe, bushy-bearded man named Steve Thomson, meets me at the entrance to a palatial Tribeca penthouse. “Sit wherever you like,” he says, gesturing into a vastness of blood-orange sectionals, accented with matching rugs and walls, chain chandeliers, and exposed timbers: a Moroccan bordello crossbred with a Dumbo loft.Both assistant and apartment come via McKellen’s most famous gig, as the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings (Thomson was a masseur on the set; McKellen’s crash pad belongs to director Peter Jackson). The second film of the prequel Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug, is out next month, but the job that brought McKellen to New York arrives first: a Broadway double bill with fellow knight Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s psychic slugfest, No Man’s Land. As comfortable as McKellen looks when he finally sinks into a couch,...
- 11/25/2013
- by Boris Kachka
- Vulture
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