Sir Ian! Cobbled together from

Sir Ian!
Cobbled together from email messages I’ve sent this afternoon, as my wrists can’t handle much more typing:
The interview thing rocked the house, but my tape recorder died so I don’t have a copy of it. I did take copious notes and will, try to do a proper writeup.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get autographs. :-( After the interview, I went up and shangaid the guy in charge, who told me Sir Ian would be leaving out the front around 2pm.
Soooo, my pals and I waited there.
…Until about 3:15, when we heard he was in the Grill being interviewed and photographed. We said to ourselves that we’d wait a while longer, as we’d waited so long already.
At about 3:45 or so, we found out he’d left out a different exit – apparently he was really close to an exit in the Grill and just decided to go out that way.
Drat.
So, no autographs. Also no chance to tell Sir Ian, “wow, I loved your presentation today, and that monologue you did was wonderful, and I loved Gods and Monsters!” *sigh*
Anyway, the interview/presentation was great – 90 minutes or so of McKellan talking about all kinds of stuff, and he finished by delivering a GREAT monologue from a play he did a while back about Sir Thomas Moore. It was BRILLIANT. I was SO pissed that my tape recorder died on me.
He told the funniest story about Christopher Lee.
Apparently, before they filmed one of the scenes in Orthanc, McKellan said to Peter Jackson (the director), “I’m going to be doing a scene with Dracula!!” (hearing Sir Ian tell this is hysterical, I’m sorry that it doesn’t come across in print. He sounded like a little boy, all excited at meeting his big hero)
Jackson said, “he’s not Dracula today, he’s Saruman,” but McKellan was still thrilled.
So they’re doing the scene, and redoing it and redoing it, and one take, after finishing his speech, Christopher Lee just leaned in really really close to McKellan and the camera, and turned into Dracula! McKellan did a hilarious imitation of this, baring his teeth and hissing.
Then Lee just leaned back in the throne with a “job well done” expression.
Poor McKellan was standing there, his heart, as he put it, going “pitter-pat” when he heard this quiet sort of giggling… and looked over to see Jackson with his arms wraped around himself trying not to howl with laughter.
Apparently Jackson had put Lee up to his little stunt. Heh.