Name: How Ian McKellen Acts With His Eyes
Uploaded: 2026-02-08T17:14:27.000Z
Duration: 6 min 37 s
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We all know that Sir Ian McKellen can act, but what makes him a great actor, and

Adverbs of manner

more specifically, what makes him great on film?

There are a lot of answers to this question.

His mastery of the material, a grasp of interpersonal relationships, and

ability to listen and be at ease in the awkward zone of a film set.

But acting, I think, is more than just putting yourself in the shoes of the character.

And part of that craft is understanding and gaining control of all the involuntary things we do when we communicate.

The inflections of the voice, the gestures of the body and the expressions of the face.

In the Lord of The Rings, Ian McKellen's eyes, in particular carry a heavy load.

Gandalf is the moral center of the story.

He's also the one who understands the significance of.

In the broadest sweep, this means that Gandalf has to broadcast a whole lot of story information to the audience.

There's always two levels to every piece of the information itself and how the character feels about it or its importance to the main story.

Getting across that second level is important, especially in fantasy, when info is often obscure.

Now you can write it into the dialogue itself.

Or if you have Ian McKellen, you can just cut to an extreme close up.

It's McKellen's eyes that are communicating the gravity of the situation.

It's something beyond worry, beyond concern, beyond even fear.

Gandalf, widening his eyes but glad, glazing them over, looks crazed, desperate, like the very possibility of Sauron obtaining the ring threatens to paralyze him with hopelessness.

McKellen dials in the look just right, and in doing so, establishes the stakes for the entire trilogy.

What's even more impressive is how he builds to this wild look all across the first part of the movie, carrying the audience through the stages of unease, gradually trapping us inside Gandalf's mind so that his agitation is ours too.

Again and again, Peter Jackson turns to McKellen to guide us, to bring us deeper into the story and the peril.

It's a great gift for a director to have an actor whose reaction shots say just as much as his dialogue, sometimes more.

In fact, reaction shots are often the thing that activates a line of important dialogue.

Sometimes in film, we don't really hear something until we see someone hearing it.

Take this moment at the Council of Elrond when Frodo makes the momentous decision to take the Ring to to Mordor.

I always tear up a little at this part, but

not when Frodo says his line just after it, I will take it.

It's the simple act of Gandalf shutting his eyes that brings it home for me.

Really, putting it into words defeats the purpose.

It's all the significance of that choice in a look.

So much of Lord of the Rings is reaction.

The scene where the Fellowship meets Galadriel, for example, is basically all eyes.

As I watch McKellen's performance, I'm fascinated by his choices.

When he returns as Gandalf the White and Two Towers, he emerges with these eternally calm eyes.

But then he widens them and his face takes on this odd trance like quality, indicating with subtle change that a move closer toward divinity is also a move further from humanity.

I wonder if another actor would have made a choice like that, because I don't think it's the obvious one.

There are around 40 muscles in the human face and they all work together to create a variety of expressions.

In real life, we're not always aware of the faces we're making, but

an actor has to be because that's where the audience is looking a lot of the time.

Time to read the emotional arc of the story, to appreciate how hard this is.

I invite you to try replicating some of Gandalf's faces in the mirror.

See if you can key into that same conviction that McKellen does.

See if you can make your eyes literally travel as Gandalfs do when he describes the afterlife to Pippin.

White shores and beyond a far green country into a swift sunrise.

Looking back across the series, I was amazed by the range of expression in McKellen's eyes.

It's not the only tool in his toolbox and it's not the only thing that makes the these films work so well.

But that range expands and deepens the emotional universe of the story.

It's a layer of performance that eliminates the need for bad dialogue.

And if nothing else, it's the kind of acting that close Ups were made for.

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