Ian McKellen Shouted “Mar-a-Lago!” on the Avengers: Doomsday Set, And the Russo Brothers Asked Him To

Ian McKellen appeared at the Cinema in Piazza film festival in Rome on Sunday and told 2,000 Marvel fans what he shouts on set when he needs to feel rage. He plays Magneto in Avengers: Doomsday, the 39th MCU film, scheduled for December 18. The Russo Brothers directed a scene in which Magneto destroys New Jersey using his powers. They pushed McKellen to perform it with more fury.

“They told me to look more furious: make it look as if you hate what you’re destroying,” McKellen told the audience. “So I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!’”

He performed a theatrical reenactment for the crowd. They laughed.

McKellen told the same story in February on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with slightly more detail on how the instruction came about. “The director, over the loudspeaker, says, ‘Ian, look more furious.’” He was then instructed to shout something. He asked what. “Shout the worst thing you could possibly think of.” He said: “With my arms outstretched, I boomed: ‘Mar-a-Lago.’”

Mar-a-Lago is the Palm Beach resort Trump has owned since 1985. He has used it to host foreign leaders and has lived there since leaving Washington. McKellen’s choice of it as the “worst thing” he could possibly think of is not a neutral acting exercise. It is a statement. And crucially, the instruction to make one came from the directors of the film.

That is the detail that separates this from a celebrity sounding off at a press junket. The Russo Brothers told McKellen to summon genuine hatred and direct it at something he personally despises. What came out was the President’s home. The political contempt was not incidental to the performance. It was the tool the filmmakers used to get the scene they wanted.

McKellen has a documented history of Trump antagonism going back nearly a decade. In 2017, after the White House declined to acknowledge Pride Month and rolled back the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order protecting LGBTQ employees from discrimination, McKellen told Variety: “It’s appalling and quite unnecessary and very un-American. The gay rights movement began in America. It began in San Francisco, it began in Stonewall, the city where Donald Trump was born and thrived.”

In a 2024 interview with The Times of London, he went further: “I have not seen him live. But he’s one of the worst public speakers there has ever been. Whether he’s reading a script or not, it’s so patent what he is.”

At the Rome festival Sunday, he added: “I can’t follow Mr. Trump. I don’t always understand what he says and when I do, I have to admit later that I got it wrong because he changed his mind or changed his mind about what he said. He’s a very bad communicator, at least to me. Get more straightforward, Donald. And then we can take you seriously.”

None of this is subtle. McKellen has been consistent about his contempt for Trump across three separate Trump campaigns and two terms in office. What is new is the confirmation that this contempt was baked directly into the production of a major Marvel film, at the directors’ explicit instruction, during performance of a scene that will appear in December’s theatrical release.

Avengers: Doomsday is one of the most anticipated films of 2026. Its marketing has focused on the reunion of the original X-Men cast alongside the MCU ensemble. Patrick Stewart, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Alan Cumming, Kelsey Grammer, and Channing Tatum all return alongside McKellen. The nostalgia engine for that original cast is real. Many of the people who will fill theaters in December to see McKellen play Magneto one more time are the same people whose homes, properties, and president he views as the worst thing he can possibly imagine.

They will buy their tickets anyway. They usually do. Whether they know what the actor was thinking when the cameras rolled is now a matter of public record.

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