Now this is one celebrity feud we never saw coming; Ian McKellen and Damian Lewis are in the midst of war of words. A quite dignified war of words but a war all the same.
McKellen has taken umbrage at a comment the actor best known these days as Brody from Homeland made in an interview with The Guardian which apparently alluded to the Lord of the Rings star's career. Speaking about why he was so desperate to break into film and TV, Lewis said, 'The idea that I would be one of these slightly over-the-top, fruity actors who would have an illustrious career on stage, but wouldn't start getting any kind of film work until I was 50 and then start playing wizards.'
We think that Lewis was actually giving himself a backhanded compliment there; he grudgingly presumed that he would have an 'illustrious career' and took it for granted that he would be able to launch a movie career at 50?
Although no names were mentioned, it's kind of obvious who the dig was at and McKellen has hit back. He told the Radio Times that, 'I wouldn't like to have been one of those actors who hit stardom quite early on and expected it to continue and was stuck doing scripts that I didn't particularly like just to keep the income up.'
Ooo, hit him with your best shot Gandalf! What else you got?
'No one needs to feel sorry for me or Michael Gambon [another famous screen wizard] or anyone else who has fallen victim to success.' Ha! Fallen victim to success? Nice one Sir!
In fairness to Brody, McKellen said that his remark was a 'fair comment'. Damian probably didn't mean to be mean - we hope so anyway because we thought we quite liked him in real life - and McKellen probably only minds only enough to, er, publicly respond.
The actors are doubtlessly too gentlemanly to let this go any further but we will be keeping an eye out for them at various events that they both might attend to see if they bring along their duelling swords.
