‘Vicious’ star Ian McKellen: “Don’t like camp people? F*cking grow up!”
With the second season of Vicious premiering on ITV tonight (Monday June 1), we thought we’d dip into the current issue of Attitude and bring you a few highlights from Simon Button’s six-page feature on the comedy, which features Sirs Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi as a gay couple who’ve been together for 50 years but have a hilariously love/hate relationship…
Cards on the table: I think Vicious is a hoot as it charts the bickering of gay couple Stuart Bixby (Sir Derek), a former barman with a caustic tongue, and Freddie Thornhill (Sir Ian), an over-the-hill-and-halfway-down-the-other-side actor with luvvie pretensions that make him ripe for Stuart’s piss-takes. The quips fly faster than the drag act banter at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern yet you know these old queens love each other. And that’s exactly what they are: old queens, with acid wit and limp wrists and more camp behaviour than some critics (like the Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell, who fumed about it being “a spiteful parody that could not have been nastier had it been devised and written by a malevolent and recriminatory heterosexual”) and gay viewers care to see on their TV screens.
But their formidable co-star Frances De La Tour is having none of it. “Well, a married couple is a stereotype, isn’t it?” she says, sounding a bit miffed. “A teenager is a stereotype.” And McKellen offers up a defiant: “We know some gay people don’t like camp gay people. Well fucking grow up! We’re around. We exist. Derek lards Stuart with that campness at times, when required, but he’s no more camp than what you’d see in many a corner shop. There are people like that and for other gay people who act more straight to deny that we’re brothers is something I find offensive. Some people are very, very camp and for god’s sake, some of those camp people are straight. It’s the variety of life.” Exasperated, he adds: “Stop it!”
And if camp is good enough for Oscar it’s good enough for everyone, De La Tour reckons. Camp as in Sean Penn’s portrayal of Harvey Milk and Oscar as in the Academy Awards. “I thought that film was so wonderful,” she says of the marvelous Milk. “He was camp and – what’s the actor’s name? Sean Penn – played him camp but with a very serious intent. The marriage of the two was wonderful and it said so much about the strength of Stonewall and that period and what they all went through. I thought it was absolutely amazing and he was as camp as bananas in it.”
McKellen decides a little more justification is in order. “Some people take offence at Alan Carr’s personality but Alan Carr isn’t putting on an act,” he says. “That’s what Alan is like. Some gays look at him and go ‘That’s offensive, that’s a stereotype’ and it may be that the people who put him on that programme did think he was a stereotype but he’s had his own back because he’s turned out to be a fully-rounded human being who’s interested in all sorts of things and likes a laugh.”
It would take a whole book to cover the history of gay characters on television, from those like John Inman’s Mr Humphries on Are You Being Served? whose sexuality was only hinted at to others like Will and Jack on Will & Grace whose gayness was explicitly declared, although they weren’t a couple and both of them were given BFFs as a buffer. Violet (De La Tour) is Freddie and Stuart’s BFF and the dotty Penelope (Marcia Warren) is also in the mix, looking bemused by the very idea of two men being romantically involved. “And I love how any homophobia in this show, anything that’s critical of gay people, comes from the woman who’s mind has gone,” says McKellen. “It’s a wonderful double-comic thing actually. Nobody takes her seriously because they never know where she’s at. It’s very cunning, that idea.”
The second series of Vicious is on ITV, Mondays from June 1st
WORDS BY SIMON BUTTON
Like what you read? Sink your teen into our full, six-page feature on Vicious – plus a whole lot more – in the June issue of Attitude, which is available to download to your mobile, iPad or tablet device now at Pocketmags.com/Attitude. You can grab it in shops now and also have it delivered directly to your door at newsstand.co.uk.
