Ian McKellen told a Rome crowd on Sunday night that he turned an Avengers: Doomsday battle scene into a political shout, saying he was told to destroy New Jersey and instead yelled “Mar-a-Lago!” while filming the Marvel film. He was speaking at an open-air cinema and showed 2,000 fans advance footage from the movie ahead of its December release.
The appearance gave McKellen a fresh public turn in a project that brings his X-Men character back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and extends the studio’s run toward Avengers: Doomsday, its 39th feature and a sequel to Avengers: Endgame, which made $2.8bn. The film is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, and McKellen’s account of the scene was the sharpest glimpse yet of how the production is handling its return to that world.
He said the directors told him to look more furious. “They got me at one point to destroy New Jersey,” McKellen said, adding that he was told to make it look as if he hated what he was destroying. “So I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!’” It was the kind of line that sticks because it sounds improvised in the moment and impossible to miss in the finished film, though McKellen did not spell out exactly how the scene lands on screen.
The Rome event was part of Cinema in Piazza, the free open-air screening and Q&A series organised by the Piccolo America Foundation, and McKellen used the night for more than one set of reflections. He also introduced Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and said he had watched the 1953 comedy as a 14-year-old with a friend. “More than a friend, really,” he said. “I was in love with him. We held hands through the whole film.”
That memory sat alongside a larger point about the kind of characters that have stayed with him, as he praised Hulot as “a character every bit as powerful as Chaplin’s Tramp, or Buster Keaton or Roberto Benigni” and called him “the inspiration for Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean.” It was an unusually personal detour from a performer best known for large-scale fantasy roles, and it underlined how freely he moved between intimate recollection and blockbuster spectacle in the same evening.
The timing mattered too. McKellen said he was experiencing a career renaissance after falling from the stage during a production of Player Kings in 2024, and he has been making the rounds again with film, stage and public appearances. He has won praise for Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, taken part in a video stage installation in New York, opened a new performing arts centre in County Durham and joined a march against the criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people in Commonwealth countries. Last week he unveiled an English Heritage blue plaque outside the former London home of Sir Laurence Olivier.
He also said he was shortly to head to New Zealand to reprise Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which is being produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Andy Serkis, who will return as Gollum. McKellen said the film is “going to tell a story that I don’t think Tolkien wrote.” For now, though, the line that will travel furthest from Rome is the one he shouted on set: not New Jersey, but “Mar-a-Lago!”
