From onscreen foes to real-life mates, Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen’s friendship was one for the books — and followers will always remember it.
The British actors — who knew one another for practically 50 years forward of Stewart’s loss of life in October 2026 on the age of 86 — met in 1977 whereas engaged on Tom Stoppard’s Each Good Boy Deserves Favour on the Royal Shakespeare Firm.
It wasn’t till many years later once they performed enemies Professor Charles Xavier, or Professor X, and Erik Lehnsherr, a.ok.a. Magneto, in 2000’s X-Males, that Stewart and McKellen cast their lifelong friendship.
“On these form of films, you spend extra time sitting in your trailer than you do in entrance of the digital camera,” Stewart revealed on Wired’s “Internet’s Most Searched Questions” YouTube collection in February 2020. “So, Ian and I frolicked collectively, ingesting tea — and perhaps within the afternoon, one thing a bit of stronger — and we received to know each other.”
The pair went on to play rivals in a number of X-Males films and later joined forces on stage for Two Performs in Rep, earlier than McKellen served because the officiant at Stewart’s 2013 wedding ceremony to Sunny Ozell.
Their remaining joint challenge was 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday.
Scroll all the way down to relive McKellen and Stewart’s bromance:
