Ian McKellen has said his fat suit “saved” him after he fell off stage during a London performance in June, though he remains in “agonising pain” while recovering from his injuries. The 85-year-old actor was two months into a season of Player Kings – playing Shakespeare’s Falstaff – when he fell from the stage into the first row of the audience at London’s Noël Coward theatre. He subsequently withdrew from the show.
“My chipped vertebrae and fractured wrist are not yet healed,” McKellen told Saga magazine in a new interview on Tuesday. “I avoid going out because I’m nervous someone might bump into me, and I’ve been dealing with agonising pains in my shoulders due to the jolt my body took. But the fat suit I wore for Falstaff saved my ribs and other joints, so I consider myself lucky.”
The Lord of the Rings actor said he has “relived that fall I don’t know how many times. It was horrible.” The fall happened during a fight scene, he said, where “my foot got caught in a chair, and trying to shake it off I started to slide on some newspaper that was scattered over the stage, like I was on a skateboard”. He fell into the lap of “someone in the front row” and started screaming.
McKellen said he doesn’t feel guilty about the accident, but continues to reassure himself that he isn’t “too old to act and it was just a bloody accident”. He added that he remains in a neck brace and his right hand remains splinted. Days after the injury, McKellen expressed interest in returning to the production, but later left the show and was replaced by his understudy, David Semark.
