During a recent appearance on CNN, out British actor Ian McKellen described Vice President Mike Pence as a “disturbed” man who should not be “in any control of situations.”

Speaking with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, McKellen rhetorically asked whether he was really brave to come out in 1988.

“I was 49,” the 79-year-old McKellen said. “What's brave about coming out at 49?”

“The expectation was that you would lose your job or the respect of others, including friends, family, if you came out. None of that happened to me. My film career took off when I came out,” he added.

When asked whether he worried that marriage equality in the United States would be undone if President Donald Trump's pick to the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, McKellen responded that he was more concerned with Pence's views on LGBT rights.

“I'm much more frightened of the words and beliefs of your vice president with regard to people like me,” McKellen answered. “I gather he thinks I should go somewhere and be cured. I believe he can't trust himself to be in a room with a woman on his own. That's a disturbed person who should not be in any control of situations.”

(Related: Trump once joked that Mike Pence “wants to hang” all gay people.)

“I think perhaps judges are a little bit more tempered than that. Are they? I don't know. But yes, it is, of course, worrying. But then that's just the system you have,” he added.

McKellen appears in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear in London.