Actor Sir Ian McKellen has found it “challenging” to portray the voice of English artist LS Lowry in the new BBC Documentary which is set to air on February 25.
The 86-year-old, who previously starred in the Lord Of The Rings and X-Men, will be playing the “not easy” role of Laurence Stephen Lowry, almost 50 years after his passing.
Sir Ian has opened up about the difficulty of “adding the body and the face” to the voice of Lowry, as he is set to lip-sync unheard recordings between Lowry and Angela Barrett, a young fan at the time who interviewed him as he recounted his childhood through to his final days.
Speaking about his role in the documentary, Sir Ian said: “I’m surprised to discover the most challenging aspect of lip syncing is making your mouth fit the recorded words.
“It ain’t easy. I don’t find it easy.”
Sir Ian has also been “amazed” by his co-star Annabel Smith’s ability. He said: “You record a sentence at a time until you’ve got an exact match.
“I’d be very interested to see what it looks like and I know what it sounds like, but am I doing enough with my face, am I doing too little? I don’t know.
“It’s a skill which I don’t think you conquer just on one attempt. But I wanted to do it not just because of my interest in Lowry, but because I thought it would be fun, rather late in my career to have a new ability.”
Sir Ian added: “What’s surprising about these Lowry tapes is that he gets the inflection wrong. He doesn’t always stress the right word.
“An actor is very concerned to do that, so that the sense of what’s being said is clear and the intention behind it is clear.
“But it’s been fun for me, beyond the words to perhaps indicate there’s sometimes a twinkle in his eye and a glance to the side that the sound recorders couldn’t have picked up.
“There’s more going on in these tapes than just the words, I think.
“You can tell an awful lot from someone’s voice. Well, when the actor adds the body and the face, then the presentation is complete.”
Sir Ian has also spoken about the importance of someone’s voice and his own family.
“I wish I had sound recordings of my long-dead family, for example, and I would love to hear my mother’s voice and my father’s.
“Not just to take me back, but because a voice reveals an awful lot about a person and would tell me things that I didn’t get a chance to understand while they were alive. I think the same’s true with hearing these tapes.”
On his own interest in LS Lowry as a person and an artist, Sir Ian said: “I mean he appeals to me as an actor because he clearly loved the theatre, we know that from his reports of his life and he liked the ballet, he liked pantomime.
“And I think that’s reflected more than people perhaps realise in the paintings and drawings.”
He added: “I think what’s revealed from these tapes is that he did very much to his work, his paintings. He was a great artist.”
The one-hour Arena documentary is also going to touch on how Salford’s industrial landscape has evolved over the years. The film is set to air on BBC Two and iPlayer at 9pm on February 25th.
