Sir Ian McKellen: ‘Challenging’ to lip sync as LS Lowry for BBC documentary
The Lord Of The Rings star will play the painter using recordings from his final days.
Actor Sir Ian McKellen has said lip-syncing the voice of acclaimed English artist LS Lowry was “not easy”, and that he found it “challenging” to portray him in a new immersive BBC documentary.
The Lord Of The Rings star, 86, will play the artist, also known as Laurence Stephen Lowry, nearly five decades on from his death in Arts Arena film LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes.
The documentary will see Sir Ian “add the body and the face” to the voice of the painter, as he lip-syncs unheard recordings between Lowry and Angela Barratt, a young fan at the time who interviewed him as he recounted his childhood through to his final days.
Speaking about the role, 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.”
The X-Men actor went on to say that he is “amazed” by his co-star Annabel Smith’s ability, adding: “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 said that a person’s voice reveals “an awful lot”, adding: “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.”
Speaking about his interest in Lowry as an artist and as a person, 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, the BBC’s long-standing arts strand, will also explore how Salford and Greater Manchester’s industrial landscape changed over the years, a feature which was often captured in Lowry’s work.
The film will air on BBC Two and iPlayer at 9pm on February 25.
