Frank and Percy with Ian McKellen at London Film Festival, review and star rating: ★★★★
Aged 87, Ian McKellen is gleefully avoiding being typecast by the sort of grandad-in-armchair roles most working actors of his age are weighed down with. And what a joy it is to see him careering about flirting with men 50 years his junior in Frank & Percy. In the drama, McKellen plays a horny old gent who chirpses much younger men he meets on grandad-themed dating websites, and forms a connection with a slightly younger man, played by Roger Allam.
Judged on the very capable work of McKellen alone, Frank & Percy is one of this year’s ripest pleasures. Hilarious as well as incredibly moving, rambunctious, mischievous Percy is a man you linger on. McKellen can still deliver bedroom eyes like his current accomplishment is the first man he’s ever made advances on, and it’s all especially appealing given he spends the movie cavorting around in Gen Z fashion (woolen peaked caps, tinted glasses, eccentric trainers). Oh, to have the zeal and self-belief of Ian McKellen at any age, let alone his!
Frank and Percy: Allan’s doe eyes
Adorably, there’s fact to this fiction: director Sean Mathias dated McKellen for a decade from 1978 to 1988, and is around the same age as Roger Allam’s Percy (City AM interviewed Mathias in 2023 for the release of the Frank and Percy stage show). You wonder which bits are made up and which are true in this gentle drama, following an aged pair of single gents who meet on Hampstead Heath while walking their dogs and form a friendship.
As for Allam, he does a very good pair of doe eyes as Frank, who looks like he’s processing a thousand thoughts a second as he contemplates the new worlds platformed by progressive, sexually-liberated Percy.
Mathias’ handsomely shot film has the old duo gallivanting around north London, Percy bounding in and out of his achingly middle class Georgian townhouse apartment and the duo perusing farmer’s markets and charity shops. It is a little twee, but honestly only a little bit; Martin Sherman’s screenplay (adapted from Ben Weatherill’s original stage play) is too filthy and hilarious to linger too long on sentiment.
Ian McKellen shines
One of the funniest scenes follows Frank meeting a series of young admirers in a pub who he’s formerly spoken with online, including a potential suitor played by Ncuti Gatwa in a cameo role (yes, 34-year-old Ncuti Gatwa, who has a granddad fetish). Another, a suited corporate, asks Percy to call him his all sorts of explicit sexual things and McKellen, in a genius performance, raises an eyebrow just enough to illicit the terrible horny hopelessness of it all. To online date at any age is ghastly, but to grapple with it in your 80s! It’s brilliant in revealing the strange ways LGBTQ men can dehumanise one another in the pursuit of intimacy (as a gay man, I can attest to this).
Sherman’s gently-does-it plot mostly swerves harder hitting stuff to prioritise queer joy. I think that’s right: premiering at this year’s London Film Festival, it clearly doesn’t carry the emotional heft of Andrew Scott’s Elsinore, about the actor Ian Charleson who played Hamlet at the National Theatre in the months before his death from AIDS, but it also platforms a brilliant, lesser-known story (this time, about elderly LGBTQ love), and in that sense, it feels similarly fresh.
Frank and Percy is released in UK cinemas in 2027