{"id":274462,"date":"2026-02-08T23:56:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T23:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/274462\/"},"modified":"2026-02-08T23:56:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T23:56:07","slug":"sir-ian-mckellen-was-on-colbert-he-performed-a-bit-of-shakespeare-that-is-so-relevant-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/274462\/","title":{"rendered":"Sir Ian McKellen was on Colbert. He performed a bit of Shakespeare that is SO relevant today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t post a lot of stories\u00a0here. The last time posted anything was in 2015. However, I saw a segment on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week that really hit me emotionally to the point that I really thought it was worth sharing here. Sir Ian McKellen was the guest on the show, and he sat for an extended interview. The whole interview is worth a watch, but it was what he did toward the end of the interview that made my wife and I sit in rapt attention. Stephen and Sir Ian got to talking about a role that he premiered back in 1964 \u2014\u00a0he played Thomas Moore in the play Sir Thomas Moore. The play was written, in part, by Shakespeare, but was never performed as it was deemed \u201cseditious\u201d at the time (according to Sir Ian). So it literally premiered in 1964. The speech that Shakespeare contributed to the play is incredibly relevant to what is happening here \u2014\u00a0and actually around the world\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the angry and ugly response of the citizenry to the presence of immigrants in the community. I really got quite emotional watching it. I wasn\u2019t able to just clip the relevant portion of the interview so the whole thing is presented here. The part of the interview that immediately precedes Sir Ian\u2019s performance starts at the 20:27 minute mark, and this bit runs for ~ 6 minutes.\u00a0 Unfortunately those who really need to hear these words never will. But that doesn\u2019t diminish the importance of the words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t post a lot of stories\u00a0here. The last time posted anything was in 2015. However, I saw&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-274462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}