Look, all I’m saying is that you people are lucky I didn’t show him with Cookie Monster. (And if you haven’t seen the segment where he teaches Cookie what “resist” means, you should do so right now. Do not resist.) I may have seen Apt Pupil first (it’s terrible; do resist despite a great performance from him), but my first real awareness of dear Sir Ian came from seeing him as Magneto. And I honestly don’t like Tolkien very much, so Gandalf was never going to outweigh that for me, I’m afraid.

I could actually go on—yes, he’s brilliant in Gods and Monsters, a movie I quote to my children (“we’re not made of sugar; we won’t melt!”), but I’ve probably spent more hours total watching him as Magneto, simply because there are more hours of it. Then again, I think I might rewatch that more often? Hard to say. His Richard III is powerful. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen The Ballad of Little Jo, and I don’t remember much about it, didn’t remember he was in it. But it’s an interesting movie, and I seem to remember that it was worth seeking out. Restoration is fun. And my goodness, he narrates a lot of things.

Also, his friendship with Sir Patrick Stewart is one of the most adorable things we have as a culture. When I was looking for images for this article, I found several pictures of the two of them kissing, because they’ll feed our shipping if we want them to. He became a Universal Life Church minister (it’s free, and they clearly don’t care if you’re an atheist) so he could perform Sir Patrick’s marriage. We are lucky to have them, and honestly one of the reasons is that they’re showing that a gay man and a straight man can have a friendship that involves physical contact without it meaning anything other than that, sometimes, friends touch each other. Which we need.

And, yes, I do always refer to him as Sir Ian. I’m given to understand that’s actually considered terribly pretentious, to use your title like that, but I’m happy that people are given titles in the UK for services to cinema and such. (I can’t speak to how Sir Ian is on stage, since I’ve never seen him on stage because I live in Olympia, Washington.) It’s funny to me that he was knighted at the same time as a senior partner of Price Waterhouse, given he’s been nominated for an Oscar twice and lost twice. And that was one of those years where he wasn’t up with, like, someone who’d come some terrible disease or another—most of the people in his category that year were for “political service,” and P. D. James was given a life peerage. Barbara Cartland was given a Dame Commander of the British Empire. So that’s got to be less awkward in line, at least. “Oh, you saved thousands of lives? Um, I was Gandalf!”

He says that, while there are many causes that matter to him, the one that’s most important is LGBT equality. He figures that, if he preaches about all of them, he’ll be “diluting the impact” of his message. He came out in 1988 to fight against an anti-gay ordinance in the UK. He lost, despite one of its sponsors caring enough about him to ask for an autograph for his kids. There have been wins and losses over the years, but he’s long been a face of gay activism, and more power to him.

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