I think it’s best for me not to get involved in the trans debate

“It’s too early for this sort of thing,” says Ian McKellen to Roger Allam, as they arrive for a photoshoot at a rehearsal space in east London. It’s 11am, but the distinguished knight of the realm was at the Hampstead Theatre last night, where the audience sang Happy Birthday to him – it was his 84th – so we can perhaps assume that he’s been celebrating. He’s wearing a stylish brown felt hat that would be too understated for Gandalf, with a large, blue silk scarf wrapped around his neck; Allam’s in a navy blazer. No sooner are both in front of the lens than all traces of crotchiness vanish, and they start to muck around and perform.

McKellen’s double act with the triple Olivier award-winner, who has just come to the end of a decade playing DCI Fred Thursday in Endeavour, goes back a while. “I don’t think of Roger as just an actor, friend and colleague,” McKellen says. “He’s a father of two lovely boys, who I’ve seen grow up, and he has a lovely partner [actress Rebecca Saire]. I feel that he’s a stable man getting on with life and coping with all the problems of family life, which I don’t have to do because I’m single. And I feel when I’m in his company, particularly when I’m with the rest of the family, that I’m a surrogate uncle or something.” 

In 1988, when both were in Glasgow to see Peter Brook’s Mahabarata, McKellen asked Allam to carry a banner on a march to protest the government’s repressive Section 28 legislation against homosexuality. He did so, despite “the most appalling hangover” from a drinking session the night before. “He’s the most gay-friendly straight man I know,” says McKellen.

Together, they’re charmers. Allam, now 69, is unfailingly droll, McKellen a storyteller who pulls you into his anecdotes with that rich, reassuring baritone that can stiffen into the voice of power and authority as it did in Lord of the Rings, or darken towards cruelty, as in his fascist Richard III.

The two first worked together in panto in 2004, sharing a dressing room to play Widow Twankey (McKellen) and the evil Abanazar (Allam) in Aladdin, then reunited for the film Mr Holmes in 2015. Today, we’re chatting about the two-hander they’re rehearsing – Frank and Percy, written by the young East Midlands’ playwright Ben Weatherill, whose play Jellyfish, about a woman with Down’s Syndrome falling in love with a neurotypical man, transferred to the National in 2019.