Ian McKellen says 'critics have lost their power' in the 21st century

In The Critic, Ian McKellen's Jimmy Erskine is the king at the top of the mountain — his word is so powerful it can make or break the person who has the misfortune of being a victim of his pen, which isn't true nowadays the actor tells Yahoo UK.

"Those were the days when the newspapers ran supreme, and that's not true in the 21st century when anyone can be a critic just by going online. Critics have lost their power," McKellen explains. "Even when I started out in the 1960s there were major writers reviewing plays, daily or weekly, and they had huge amounts of power."

Such is the case in his latest production, a drama that centres on critic Jimmy and his collaboration with actor he has often derided in print, Nina Land (Gemma Arterton). When his job comes at risk because of his barbed tongue, and the taboo around his sexuality, he enlists the help of Nina to keep his position as theatre critic, and in return she will earn his unyielding favour which will help her become a star.

McKellen himself has a long history on the stage, but he admits he has never had the misfortune of meeting a critic like Erskine in real life: "I don't think anybody else has, I hope. There was a critic in the 1930s, which is when this film was set, called James Agate who was renowned in his time for his ability to make or break a career. You had to be in James Agate's good books otherwise and you were rather disregarded."

He went on: "Worst of all, in New York, unless you've got a good review in The New York Times in the 1960s you were rather wasting your time, because everyone knew what that reviewer had said and they had enormous power. Not true today, and perhaps it's a bit healthier."

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Reflecting on the film as a whole, the Lord of the Rings star elaborated: "I think I would sum it all up as a melodrama, people behaving larger than life. The cunning of it is, [author Patrick] Marber has written characters who are so real that they are just people who behave melodramatically.

"You want to keep out of their way, whether they're fascists on the street or Jimmy Erskine writing vituperation in his daily column. It's all too credible, but it wouldn't be if it weren't set in that melodramatic decade, the 1930s."

The film is full to bursting with some of the biggest names in the British film industry, with McKellen and Arterton being joined by Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, Ben Barnes, Romola Garai, and Alfred Enouch amongst others. Director Anand Tucker shares with Yahoo UK how "incredibly lucky" he was to get the calibre of actors he did for the production, adding that they were "extraordinary" on set.

"They're all really, really nice people, whether the film is good or bad in the end you spend a long time together and those are the days of your life," he said. "The experience of just all being together and, not to sound too lavish about it, but trying to all do something, a common endeavour that felt exciting to everyone there, I was really lucky and it was a really nice experience."

Speaking of McKellen and Arterton specifically, Tucker added: "They had fun playing those roles, they had great energy together. I've been in situations where that energy doesn't work, and so then you have to fall back on different things but honestly they just did it, it was just there."

It was Arterton who McKellen shared the most scenes with, which came as a great joy to him because she is the kind of person who "instantly" became a close friend.

"I hadn't worked with Gemma before," McKellen reflects. "But I was looking forward to it enormously because I'd admired her performances, and then in person she is such a jolly, sweet natured person that it felt like you got a new friend instantly. You know that feeling when someone's extremely positive and listens to what you've got to say.

"She was pregnant at the time and that was a source of great joy. of course, to her and now the baby's born and she's a mother, and I couldn't be happier for her.

"We got on terribly well and even better did we get on because she's such a wonderful actor, technically she could do things that most actors can't, like, cry on cue —I can't do that, I don't know how that's done— perhaps because she feels things so deeply, I could go on for a long time about how subtle she is, the acting doesn't get in the way."

McKellen was also delighted to reunite with Strong once more, having acted opposite him in the early days of his career: "Working with Mark, who I'd known at the National Theatre when I was doing Richard III, watching his progress in the last 30, 40 years, so it's all a bit of a loving actually."

While McKellen is effusive in his praise of his co-stars, Tucker notes how important he is to the film: "Ian brings all his own experience of his life in the theatre and his experience of some of the great theatre critics when he was starting out as an actor to [the role], and then you get Jimmy Erskine, who I do think is a fabulous cinematic character to bring to the British canon."

The Critic premieres in cinemas on Friday, 13 September.