A Christmas dream come true…
A double-dose of X-men‘s Sir Patrick Stewart and Lord of the Ring‘s Sir Ian McKellen on Broadway!
The always elegant and dapper British actors are performing in not just one, but in two alternating plays on Broadway this season: Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” and Samuel Beckett’s classic “Waiting for Godot,”
Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart sat down with “Power Players” to discuss how they manage to keep from mixing up their alternating characters.
In an interview with “Power Players” the actors discussed how they keep from mixing up their alternating characters.
“If you’re a teacher and you’re teaching geography from 10:00 to 11:00, but at 11:00 to 12:00, you start to teach math, you don’t get them mixed up,” McKellen said. “They’re different.”
McKellen and Stewart have been running around NYC in bowler caps, calling themselves “Gogo” and “Didi,” their characters’ nicknames in “Waiting for Godot, enjoying local fare at Coney Island, peering out on the city from the top of the Empire State Building, and even meeting Elmo on “Sesame Street.”
“It’s just been, for them, a time of their lives,” Stewart said.
This is not the first time the two have acted on Broadway and they agree that the city has changed a bit.
“In 1967, when I first came here and saw a man urinating on the statue of George M. Cohan in Times Square,” McKellen said. “Do that today and you’d be locked up in Bloomberg’s cellar, wouldn’t you?”
“I worked in ’70, and for a three month, four month season, 41st Street, 42nd Street, Broadway, Times Square was our world. And it is almost unrecognizable now from how it was,” Stewart said.
They love the fans in NYC and say they compare to no other.
“The audiences are a constant — in my experience — for the last 40 years when I’ve been coming,” McKellen explained.
“They are more enthusiastic about going out and enjoying themselves in front of a live performance than anywhere else in the world.”
Image via YouTube