McKellen Shouts 'Mar-a-Lago' Filming Avengers: Doomsday
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- Ian McKellen told a crowd of 2,000 at Rome's Cinema in Piazza festival that during a scene destroying New Jersey for Avengers: Doomsday, directors Anthony and Joe Russo told him to "look more furious" and "hate what you're destroying," prompting him to shout "Mar-a-Lago!"
- Avengers: Doomsday, the MCU's 39th feature directed by the Russo brothers, releases in December as a sequel to Avengers: Endgame ($2.8bn box office) and brings McKellen and Patrick Stewart's X-Men characters back into the Marvel fold
- McKellen revealed he is heading to New Zealand to reprise Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis and produced by Peter Jackson, describing the film as "a story that I don't think Tolkien wrote"
- The 87-year-old actor is in a career renaissance after recovering from a stage fall during a 2024 production of Player Kings, with 2025 bringing Steven Soderbergh's The Christophers and an innovative video stage installation in New York
- McKellen also recently opened a performing arts centre in County Durham, joined a march against the criminalisation of LGBTQ+ people in Commonwealth countries, and unveiled an English Heritage blue plaque outside Sir Laurence Olivier's former London home
- The Rome appearance was part of Cinema in Piazza, a free open-air screening and Q&A series organised by the Piccolo America Foundation, a group of young activists who occupied an abandoned cinema in 2012 to fight gentrification
Why it matters: The "Mar-a-Lago!" anecdote turns a routine MCU promo stop into a politically charged clip likely to dominate coverage of Avengers: Doomsday's December rollout, while McKellen's confirmation that The Hunt for Gollum will tell a story "Tolkien didn't write" signals Warner Bros' clearest commitment yet to expanding Middle-earth beyond the author's canon — a creative bet that carries real fan-base risk.
