Lee Pace
It seemed Ian McKellen thought he was making a fairly innocuous comment. He made it back in 2012 to the German magazine Brash, where he talked about how far gay actors have come in the last 10 year.
He compared the lack of openly gay actor in Lord Of The Rings to The Hobbit, saying “Look only at how many gay actors are in Hobbit—two of the dwarves, along with Luke Evans, Stephen Fry and Lee Pace… In Lord of the Rings I was the only one, apart from my make-up artist and a guy in wardrobe team. That is progress, or what?”
No one particularly noticed the comment at the time, but now it’s attracting a bit of attention, as McKellen may have accidentally outed a few people. While Stephen Fry is indeed out and proud, Evans used to be out but has now gone back inside again (not coincidentally he shut up about his sexuality when his career started taking off). Lee Pace meanwhile has never officially been out at all, despite a number of rumours. However McKellen seems pretty sure that he’s gay.
As for ‘two of the dwarfs’, the only openly gay one of their number is Adam Brown (who plays Ori). The rediscovered comment from Sir has led to speculation the other dwarf is Richard Armitage (Thorin), who’s previously been subject to rumours he’s dating Pace. However there’s no actual evidence of that, so we’ll leave you to speculate on who it might be.
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