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Sir Ian McKellen on Sunday said he would yell out “Mar-a-Lago,” referring to President Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., resort, while portraying “X-Men” villain Magneto when shooting scenes of destruction for the upcoming Marvel film “Avengers: Doomsday.”
The British actor spoke with The Guardian about his time shooting the film and described a scene where brothers Anthony and Joel Russo, who directed the movie together, “got me at one point to destroy New Jersey.”
They approached McKellen and “told me to look more furious: make it look as if you hate what you’re destroying. So I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!”
McKellen told a similar version of the story while appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in February.
“So I’m standing up, pretending to [destroy New Jersey], and the wind is blowing in my hair, and I’m putting on a fierce look, and I’m trying to be magnetic,” McKellen told Colbert at the time. “And the director, over the loudspeaker, says, ‘Ian, look more furious.'”
McKellen, in recounting the story to Colbert, stood up with his arms outstretched and his brows furrowed as if slipping into character. After he was told to shout out “the worst thing you could possibly think of,” he boomed the name of Trump’s resort.
“Will I be allowed back in the country?” he quipped.
Colbert, a vocal Trump critic, replied to the Shakespearean actor: “Will you be allowed back in the country? No guarantees. I don’t think I’m the right person to ask for that.”
The “Lord of the Rings” actor has been outspoken in slamming Trump since his first administration. In 2017, McKellen lambasted the White House for not recognizing Pride Month and rolling back the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order, which protected LGBTQ employees from discrimination.
“It’s appalling and quite unnecessary and very un-American. The gay rights movement began in America. It began in San Francisco, it began in Stonewall, the city where Donald Trump was born and thrived,” he told Variety at the time, referring to New York City.
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Avengers: Doomsday
Donald Trump
Ian McKellen
Magneto
Mar-a-Lago
President Trump
Sir Ian McKellen
Stephen Colbert
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View original source — The Hill ↗

