John Simon Belittles Ian McKellen’s Junk … Again?

Ian McKellen is proud of his junk and sensitive to those who might criticize it. A few years ago, during an interview about another McKellen project, he asked us about his “old friend� John Simon, our former, exacting theater critic. Like many actors, he was still nursing a grudge regarding a negative review. In this case, though, he claims the negative review was of his junk. For what it’s worth, a long search through the magazine’s archives — and John Simon’s collected theater reviews — failed to bring up much more than a reference to McKellen’s performance in 1984’s Wild Honey: “McKellen mugs, struts, fidgets, prances, erupts, and shrivels expertly� (emphasis ours). Surely this can’t be what McKellen was so upset about, can it?

“I was quite surprised by the review,� McKellen told us archly at the time. “As I recall, Mr. Simon is the only person who has ever complained.�

And now Simon’s complaining again! Or … is he?

In his Bloomberg News review of King Lear, Simon gives McKellen a B+ for his performance (“better than I expected but less than I would wish for�) but takes another jab at McKellen’s manhood, so to speak:

As for Lear (and this, surely, is more McKellen than Nunn), although he is supposed to be “every inch a king,� he gives us several inches of frontal nudity that neither Shakespeare nor we bargained for, though they may work as a form of self-advertisement.

Actually, this one might be laudatory. It’s sort of hard to tell. —Logan Hill

McKellen’s Naked Lear Reveals Only So Much Royalty [Bloomberg]
Earlier: Ian McKellen Strips Down in ‘King Lear’