McKellen, who sat down with the book only after completing the film, says Brown’s story was short on character. "The plot is what keeps you turning the page,” explained McKellen. “You get to know more about the characters is what happens in some novels, but you get more about what they're interested in as well - the code, everything to do with Leonardo and Jesus and Mary. And actually the description of Leigh Teabing makes me inappropriate casting. He's small and round and white haired and I think balding and a jolly man. I'm rather gaunt and narrow. But Ron Howard didn't care and I don't think that Dan Brown did because the only description of my character is when you first meet him and thereafter his size is forgotten because he is on crutches, or sticks in our case, not crutches."
McKellen continued. “I thought that he was a really interesting man and there was a lot for me to delve into about it. How did he get his polio, for example? What was his relationship with his life. We filled in a whole back story and if you're looking, you can see it because the house is full of little clues as to what his past was like. But it's nothing to do with the plot, really.”
McKellen’s leery of giving away anything that might be considered a spoiler but does describe his character as “someone who is hugely enthusiastic about the business of Jesus and Mary. He is indeed, but his interest is so intense that it perhaps encourages him to do things that he probably shouldn't do. I wouldn't want to go any further than that…”
Having starred in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, McKellen is no stranger to being a part of a film with a passionate following. “Lord of the Rings [was] 50 times, 100 times bigger than 'The Da Vinci Code.' Millions around the world over all the generations, and they were much, much more… [It was] a book for them that was central to their lives. It wasn't just an exciting read. It was a book that they read 20 times, in some cases. They were very, very interested in the movie. Very disturbed about whether it was going to be the movie of their book or was it going to be Peter Jackson's book.”
McKellen said, “I think that with The Da Vinci Code, I doubt if people have [read] it more than once. It's not that sort of book. You understand it as you go along and having understood it – it's like a crossword. Once you've done the crossword, you don't rub it out and do it all over again and go onto another one, do you? I don't. Of course though there is an immense interest, but it's not the same sort of interest as you got with Tolkien where it was almost like filming the Bible for some people.”
The Catholic Church is publicly denouncing the film yet strangely enough, Brown’s book didn’t elicit the same level of criticism. “I noticed that,” acknowledged McKellen. “Probably a bit of snobbery in there somewhere. The people who go and see movies, their minds aren't as finely tuned as those who read a book. Is that what the Vatican is thinking? Therefore they have to be protected from what they see? I don't approve of censorship. I don't approve of having lists of things that you can't see. The good thing about it is that once you publish a list of things that you can't look at or can't read, it makes everyone want to do everything that you don't want them to do. So I think on the whole that those elements in the Catholic Church that are kept quite, like Opus Dei are doing the right thing. They should just accept that this is a fictional thriller, but Dan Brown may claim more of it.”
As for his own opinion of Brown's story, McKellen said, "I think that the facts in the movie may well be challengeable, but maybe the truths are not. Maybe he's onto something about the nature of the institution which has been around and is as powerful as long as the Catholic Church has. Maybe it isn't quite the organization that it happens to look like from the outside. Maybe there are secrets and that would be a truth about an organization like the Catholic Church that is probably incontrovertible. But the facts, the details of his criticism, I'm happy to believe have all been made up.”
