Sir Ian McKellen stirs controversy claiming actresses traded sex for roles

Sir Ian McKellen has stirred controversy by saying that actresses in the 60s would be willing to trade roles for sex.

McKellen made the remarks during a recent Q&A at the Oxford Union.

“People must be called out and it’s sometimes very difficult for victims to do that,” he said.

“I hope we’re going through a period that will help to eradicate it altogether. But from my own experience, when I was starting acting in the early Sixties, the director of the theatre I was working at showed me some photographs he got from women who were wanting jobs. Some of them had at the bottom of their photograph ‘DRR’ — directors’ rights respected.

“In other words, if you give me a job, you can have sex with me. That was commonplace from people who proposed that they should be a victim. Madness. People have taken advantage of that and encouraged it and it absolutely will not do.”

He also added that he feared some will be wrongly accused as the scandal continues to grow.

“I assume nothing but good will come out of these revelations, even though some people get wrongly accused — there’s that side of it as well,” he went on.

The Lord of the Rings actor also spoke briefly about Kevin Spacey, with whom he worked at The Old Vic Theatre in London when Spacey was its creative director, and the nature of his coming out as gay.

Spacey was slammed for coming out while also making an apology for an alleged sexual assault that he claimed he did not remember.

“The circumstances in which he chose to do it are reprehensible because it linked alleged underage sex with a declaration of sexuality,” said McKellen, who has been a prominent gay rights activist since coming out himself in the late 1980s.

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