You never know how your actions or words could affect someone else, either positively or negatively. Young actor Troye Sivan illustrated this recently on Larry King now when he recalled a touching story about how Sir Ian McKellan‘s encouraging words when he was a teenager stuck with him long after they happened. Even better, McKellen himself gave a response to the touching anecdote.
Troye Sivan is an up-and-coming 28-year-old Australian singer and actor. He recently appeared in The Idol and played young Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009. He’s had a top ten album in both the U.S. and Australia, but 13 years ago, he was a young actor just trying to make a name for himself.
Sitting with King at an elegant wooden table, he was asked: “The best piece of advice he’s ever received.” Sivan, an obviously thoughtful individual, ponders it and says, “Hmm, that’s a really good question.”
“I was in waiting for Godot the stage play,” he said. “With Ian McKellen.”
“Oh, you were? At your age?”
“I think I was 15,” he said. “To be honest, I actually think that he knew that I was gay. I hadn’t come out yet. But I think he knew. I don’t know if he remembers this or anything; I don’t know if anyone remembers this except for me.”
Sivan said he might’ve been “overreading into it,” but McKellen shook his hand and told him to “keep going, you’ll be fine.” Sivan mused that he didn’t know if McKellen was talking about acting or something more personal, but it stuck with him all these years later.
The clip, posted by King, caught McKellen’s eye, and he responded by reposting it and sharing an anecdote of his own:
“Troye Sivan played Boy in Waiting for Godot in Perth when I played Gogo. He was 15, I was 71. He remembers my saying something encouraging to him and wonders if I recognized that the closeted teenager was gay.”
In the comments, McKellen continued the recollection:
“I wonder if he realized three of the four grown-up British actors in the production were gay. So were the director and designer. Troye fitted in.” McKellen then drew a parallel between the X-Men superhero group and how they were “extreme versions of other ill-treated minorities, particularly gays. Troye fitted into that world, too. Now, in his stardom, he invites us to fit into his world.”
By the way, McKellen came out when it wasn’t as acceptable to do so in 1988 on an appearance on U.K. radio. He was arguing against some laws proposed in England that would make it illegal to “promote homosexuality.”
“Almost overnight, everything in my life changed for the better — my relationships with people and my whole attitude toward acting changed,” McKellen said earlier this year.
There’s actually a transcript of McKellen’s words on his website.
“I think it’s offensive to anyone who is, like myself, homosexual, apart from the whole business of what can or cannot be taught to children,” he said.
As for Sivan, he came out publicly in August of 2013 through a YouTube video.
“This is the most nervous I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Sivan said in the video. “It feels kind of weird to have to announce it like this on the Internet, but… this is not something that I’m ashamed of, and it’s not something anybody should have to be ashamed of, so why not share it with all of you guys?”
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