Set in 1947, McKellen plays a long-retired incarnation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes. Holmes now lives in a sleepy Sussex village with his housekeeper and her amateur-sleuthing son. It's not a peaceful retirement though. The detective is haunted by an unsolved fifty year old case involving an angry husband and his unstable wife, a case of which he only remembers fragments.
McKellen spoke with Empire recently about the project:
"It’s a charming book. That’s going to be my next job, when I’m finished on Broadway and I’m back with Bill Condon again, who I did Gods And Monsters with, and I’ll be filming in London, which will be wonderful. I’ve never had ambitions to play Sherlock Holmes, but this is Sherlock in a very particular place… he’s nearly 100 years old, and in retirement, and it’s more about being a beekeeper than it is being a detective."
He was asked whether he has seen Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch's take on the famous detective:
"Of course, of course! I wanted to look at this Martin Freeman chap as Doctor Watson. I've met Benedict a couple of times. I knew his father, Timothy Carlton and , when we were both quite young, and I remember him telling me that his real name was Cumberbatch. 'But of course I had to change it because you could never be successful with a surname like that.'"
Jeffrey Hatcher is writing the adapted script from the novel by author Mitch Cullin.
Anne Carey, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Aviv Giladi will produce the movie.
Production begins next April in the UK.
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