Ian McKellen on coming out: ‘Most people don’t have to but if you’re in the public eye there comes a time when it’s appropriate’

It was 27 years ago that Ian McKellen came out to the world as a gay man.

He was 49 when he took the public step in 1988 to speak out against a controversial bill under consideration in the British Parliament that proposed prohibiting local authorities from promoting homosexuality.

‘A law was being passed I didn’t approve of which disadvantaged gay people, and that’s when I came out,’ McKellen told Charlie Rose this week. ‘And it was just the right time for me, because, 49, I was confident as an actor, as a person. And I could organize a sentence and make a case and feel passionate about it…there was a part for me to play within the gay rights movement in the UK and I loved it, I relished it. Acting was involved of course, but acting the truth. And then I felt a better person all the way around.’

In the years since, McKellen’s career has only soared. He’s earned two Oscar nominations, won a Golden Globe Award and landed his two best-known most well known film roles: Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies and Magneto in the X-Men films.

Now 76, McKellen looks back and still wishes ‘I’d felt able to come out earlier.’

But he had his reasons for remaining private.

‘Everything in society was against people of my generation coming out, because it was against the law to make love,’ he explained. ‘So if every time you have sex you remind yourself you’re a criminal, that’s not something you necessarily want to talk about unless you’re a really, really strong and brave person which I wasn’t, so I got on very comfortable with my life as an openly gay man without ever talking about it. And most people don’t have to but if you’re in the public eye there comes a time when it’s appropriate.’