Out British actor Ian McKellen has
criticized President Donald Trump, saying that what the president
enjoys most in life is fame.
CNN's Christiane Amanpour asked
McKellen, 79, his thoughts on Trump.
“He’s so illiterate,” McKellen
replied. “He displays his inadequacies every time he opens his
mouth, I’m afraid. And every time he tweets … dictators and
leaders have taken advantage of the mass media ever since it was
available to them whether it was the radio, advertising and now
television or film. And he’s the master of the television, you have
to grant him that. … It seems to me, as an outsider, that what he
enjoys most in life is not power but fame.”
McKellen, who stars in a London
production of Shakespeare's King Lear, added that Vice
President Mike Pence's views on LGBT rights “frightened” him.
“I'm much more frightened of the
words and beliefs of your vice president with regard to people like
me,” McKellen said. “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.)