Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel on art, their friendship and 'The Christophers'

NEW YORK – Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel met like their characters in “The Christophers” do, with a knock on the door.

Coel, taking a break from writing her upcoming BBC-HBO series “First Day on Earth” in Ghana, turned up at McKellen’s house in London to go over the script with him and screenwriter Ed Solomon.

“I walked into your house,” Coel recalls in an interview alongside McKellen. “I knew who you were. You were like, ‘Hello! What are you? What are you then?’”

“You looked interesting and beautiful,” says McKellen, smiling. “And you are.”

On-screen chemistry can be elusive, especially when two characters are intended to be diametric opposites. In “The Christophers,” McKellen stars as the artist Julian Sklar, a David Hockney-like star who hasn’t painted in years and now spends much of his days grousing in his disheveled townhouse while filming personalized videos that trade on his celebrity. Coel, the creative force behind “I May Destroy You,” plays Lori Butler, an art restorer hired to be Julian’s assistant with the tacit task, while she’s there, of forging additional paintings of “the Christophers,” Julian’s most famous and highly lucrative series.

The movie, crafty and charming, is almost entirely a two-hander. It belongs to McKellen and Coel and the charged interplay between them. They are bitter foes, scheming co-conspirators and fellow artists weighing the erratic value of their work.

As screen presences and cultural figures, McKellen, 86, and Coel, 38, could hardly be more different. McKellen, a titan of Shakespeare, Gandalf of the big screen, is more than twice the age of Coel, the multihyphenate whose autobiography-tinged work has made her a voice of a much different generation.

Yet in “The Christophers,” they make one of the more memorable on-screen pairs in years, matching McKellen's warm grandiosity with Coel's cool cunning. (The difference in cheekbones, alone, is vast.) And as they showed on a recent day in downtown New York, they are also now great chums. If “The Christophers” is about two artists from wildly different backgrounds finding an understanding, its stars have gone a few steps further.

“We’re a bit silly about each other,” grants McKellen.

“Yes, we are,” agrees Coel. “It’s morning kisses. It’s cuddles. It’s ‘Oh should we have a nap?’ We buddied up very much.”

Soderbergh on ‘where life starts’

Steven Soderbergh, the restless, mercurial director of “Out of Sight,” “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Black Bag,” has found himself increasingly focused, he says, on distilling something to its absolute essence. “The Christophers,” which Soderbergh kick-started by throwing a few ideas at Solomon, was conceived with an old-fashioned set up.

“Two people in a room together is where life starts,” says Soderbergh.

His guiding principle in shooting “The Christophers” was not to interfere with the magnetism of his lead performers. Soderbergh serves as his own cameraman, making him essentially the third player in every scene.

“There’s something about the two of them together that adds up to more than the two of them,” the director says. “My job was to be sure I’m in the right place, always, to capture it and not indulge in any kind of trickery that would distract or diminish what they’re doing. So you have to be secure in the material and the performers and not try to tart it up because you’re worried about boring people.”

While McKellen and Coel's differences might be glaring, the two quickly found common ground.

“Guess what we’ve got in common,” McKellen says. “We’re neighbors.”

Both McKellen and Coel live in East London, about a 15 minute walk from each other. McKellen remembers being curious about the nearby Catholic school Coel attended as a girl.

“I promise you I’ve longed to look inside there,” McKellen says. “I wonder who those kids are?”

“Maybe I’ve been on the bus when you’ve been walking past,” says Coel, smiling.

Unanswered questions

They are also both, in their own way, novices when it comes to film acting. Coel has only appeared in a handful of movies; her last one was “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” a big-budget experience she’s said she wasn’t ready for. McKellen, of course, has acted in many more films — among them “Gods and Monsters,” the “X-Men” films and “Mr. Holmes.” But he begins every movie by asking his directors how to act in front of a camera.

“And they’ve never given me an answer,” says McKellen. “Martin Mann, John Schlesinger, Bill Condon, Peter Jackson, now Soderbergh.”

Coel is confused. “Are you tricking them with this question?”

“No, it’s a genuine question,” McKellen replies. “There must be a technique for acting in front of the camera. All I know is what I’ve heard Michael Caine say in chat show interviews.”

Caine’s advice was technical; in close-up, talk to the eye closer to the camera. And Kenneth Branagh once gave him a note: “Don’t move your head so much.” But as an actor most home on the stage, the camera remains mystifying to McKellen.

“Having done so much theater where the audience is present, you can hear the audience. You can detect when they’re bored, when they’re excited,” McKellen says. “You’re controlling them in a sense. You’re the master of ceremonies. They’re there. Making a film, they’re not there. The real audience doesn’t get there until the actors have gone on to the next job or died.”

Coel offers that she was once told not to blink.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” McKellen says with mock offense.

‘The cheekiest artistry’

The life of an artist — the craft, the compensation, the legacy — is at the forefront of “The Christophers.” Julian, nearing the end of his life, is pondering what he’s leaving behind. The subject of the Christophers paintings relates to a long-ago relationship that prompts Julian to remark: “That’s the thing, isn’t it? To linger in the minds of others.” For a performer whose presence has loomed so large for so many, it’s a poignant line.

“It’s been the greatest delight of my life to know that there are people in whose minds my work has lingered,” says McKellen. “Sometimes at the stage door you’ll meet a couple of my age and they’ll say, ’We just wanted to let you know we had our first date when we saw you play Romeo at Stratford in 1976. And I said, ‘Are you still together?’ ‘Yes.’ (McKellen sighs with great relief.) But to be part of people’s lives who you’ve never met, what a feeling.”

Coel is at a different point in her career, still awakening to the thrill of acting. She loves it, she says. “This is the cheekiest artistry,” Coel says, grinning.

McKellen leans back and reconsiders.

“I just had a thought that you’d be very good at playing Julian Sklar, my part in the film. And I’d have a crack at playing your part.”

Coel laughs. “I love that. Swap? Well it kind of happens in a way, doesn’t it?

“It does, actually,” McKellen agrees. “They do overlap.”

“How fab,” says Coel.