TOM HANKS: SIR IAN MCKELLEN IS A PLAYHOUSE

Sir Ian McKellen plays another sir in The Da Vinci Code, Sir Leigh Teabing. Tom Hanks says acting opposite McKellan is like being in a gigantic playhouse.

Sir Ian McKellen is doubly delightful these days as he can also be seen as Magneto in X Men: The Last Stand.

“I don’t think anybody has more fun acting than Sir Ian McKellan. Our first scene on film was very representative of every day we had in meetings and in rehearsals. There was just this constant delightful probing that went on. He’ll say a line, we were at the table and he’d go through a patch of dialogue and he’d say something like, ‘well my brain just turned around in on itself there. What was he saying?’ He’s always looking at it like scanning out, not just the dialogue but the sensibilities behind it. From my experience when he gets on the set he never stops playing with what the task is at hand whether it’s sitting at the table talking about the history of the Priory of Sian or it’s coming down the stairs to say, ‘who do we have here?’ It just comes out different every time. I thought this guy is the biggest playhouse in the world. His job is to deliver these lines in a new way and lo and behold he seems to delight in finding a new