"Magneto" aka "Gandalf" visits the FSU Mag Lab

parent2noles · 10-29-2009, 10:22 PM

Interesting story...

Quote:

Some jokes are just too good — and too obvious — to resist.

When Oscar-nominated British actor Sir Ian McKellen — who is probably best known in America for playing the super-powered mutant Magneto in the “X-Men” movies — spent Tuesday morning touring the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Innovation Park, the Magneto quips came fast and early.

“It’s a lot cheaper (to pay $3,000 an hour to run the magnet) than to get Ian to do it,” Nobel Prize-winning chemist and Florida State faculty member Sir Harry Kroto quipped. “Of course, Ian could just put his finger in there to get it to work. You don’t need all this when you’re Magneto.”

“Yes, all of this is redundant,” McKellen said before he stopped briefly to hold up his hands as if putting a Magneto-style whammy on one of the magnet operators.

McKellen, who has been friends with Kroto since they were teens at school together in England during the ‘50s, was in town to visit Kroto’s high-tech playground as well as talk to theater students at FSU.

“At this point in my life, I’m interested in teaching and giving back,” McKellen, 70, said. “And Harry is all about recruiting people to teach. So I’m really here for Harry.”

McKellen is a classically trained stage actor with a lengthy list of film credits that includes “Gods and Monsters” (1998), “Richard III” (1995) and the role of Gandalf in the blockbuster “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

When asked what he was going to talk about with the student actors at FSU, McKellen said: “I’ll probably talk about camera acting, technique, what an actor’s life should be like. Who knows, maybe they’ll want me to gossip about some of names I’ve worked with. It’s up to them.”

See: Magneto meets Mag Lab with actor Ian McKellen | tallahassee.com | Tallahassee Democrat