Ian McKellen 'So Disappointed' He Didn't Realize in 2005 'X-Men' Co-Star Elliot Page was LGBTQ

Acclaimed British actor Ian McKellen, who has been out since 1988, revealed in a recent interview that he's "so disappointed" he didn't pick up on Elliot Page being LGBTQ back in the early 2000s when they were making an "X Men" film together.

McKellen's interview was with British LGBTQ publication Attitude, reported newspaper the Daily Mail. In the interview, McKellen recalled how Page - a teenager who had been cast as Kitty Pryde in "X-Men: The Last Stand" - spoke too softly to hear as the movie was being filmed. Production on the film took place in late 2005 and early 2006.

Telling the interviewer that he and Page were "sat as close as we are now," McKellen, who played the villain Magneto, said that "I had to speak when they'd finished, and I couldn't hear what they were saying. Nobody could hear what they were saying."

Page came out as gay in 2014, at which point, McKellen cracked, "suddenly you couldn't stop them talking. You heard everything."

But coming out, the actor added, is empowering. "Everything gets better because you get self-confidence," McKellen noted. "You get better in terms of relationships, friends of all sorts, family, if you're lucky."

McKellen's own coming out in 1988 was a principled protest against a government policy of banning "promotion" of homosexuality in Britain. His acting career continued on despite the biases of the times.

Page came out as transgender in a Twitter message at the end of last year, saying both that he was "profoundly happy" and also "scared of the invasiveness, the hate, the 'jokes' and the violence."

Page decried the epidemic of lethal crimes targeting trans women, most of the people of color, that reached a near-record high in 2020. Page also revealed that he uses male and neutral pronouns "he" and "they."

McKellen voiced his support for Page, and said that his disappointment in himself came from his failure to "detect what their difficulty was with communicating," Insider reported.

Page and McKellen went on to co-star again in "X-Men: Days of Future Past," revisiting their respective characters.

Though they did not co-star, and their appearances were three decades apart, both actors were also in the "Tales of the City" miniseries, with McKellen appearing in the first TV adaptation in 1993 and Page starring as the LGBTQ daughter of two of the original characters in the 2019 followup.