On Sunday night at an open-air cinema in Rome, Sir Ian McKellen showed a crowd of 2,000 film fans advance footage of his appearance in the superhero film Avengers: Doomsday.

The film, which is released in December, sees a return for the X-Men played by McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU’s 39th feature, it is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, and intended as a sequel to their 2019 film Avengers: Endgame, which made $2.8bn and is the second highest-grossing film of all time.

Speaking in Rome about his experiences shooting the film, McKellen said that at one point “they got me at one point to destroy New Jersey”. Rising from his seat to re-enact the scene, he said that the Russos “told me to look more furious: make it look as if you hate what you’re destroying. So I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!’”

McKellen, 87, introduced one of his favourite films, Jacques Tati’s 1953 comedy Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday – which he described watching as a 14-year-old with a friend. “More than a friend, really,” he said. “I was in love with him. We held hands through the whole film.”

McKellen went on to describe Hulot as “a character every bit as powerful as Chaplin’s Tramp, or Buster Keaton or Roberto Benigni. He’s the inspiration for Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean and the idea of us all gathered together in the open air and a balmy evening to watch the film seems to me a perfect way to watch this particular film.”

McKellen is experiencing a career renaissance after being injured falling from the stage during a production of Player Kings in 2024. This year saw the release of Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, for which McKellen won rave reviews, as well as McKellen’s involvement in an innovative video stage installation in New York.

Last month he opened a new performing arts centre in County Durham and joined a march against the criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people in Commonwealth countries, while last week he unveiled an English Heritage blue plaque outside the former London home of Sir Laurence Olivier.

Speaking in Rome, McKellen revealed he was shortly to head to New Zealand to reprise his role as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Andy Serkis, who also reprises the role of Gollum.

The film, said McKellen, is “going to tell a story that I don’t think Tolkien wrote”.

McKellen’s appearance was part of the Cinema in Piazza festival, a free series of open-air screenings and Q&As organised by the Piccolo America Foundation, created by a group of young activists who occupied an abandoned cinema in 2012 to fight the gentrification of the city. Other stars scheduled to take part this year include Edgar Wright and Léa Seydoux.