Though he is certainly getting up there in years, Sir Ian McKellen has spent the last 15 years playing some of the most legendary characters in pop culture. We've seen him morph metal as Magneto, wave a magical staff as Gandalf, and now he's playing the most iconic detective of all time. Check him out in the first trailer for Mr. Holmes below.
This isn't the first time that we've gotten a peek at Bill Condon's upcoming Mr. Holmes, with images and clips having previously been released, but it's still tremendously easy to be charmed by this trailer. The movie is telling a part of the Sherlock Holmes tale that we haven't seen on the big screen before - with the master detective nearing the end of his life - but it has a wonderful spark that comes from McKellen's presence and a stylish, period flair.
Because the movie seems to be set in at least two different time periods, it's interesting to note that Ian McKellen has put on some makeup and prosthetics to play the aging Holmes. While the differences in the looks are subtle, you can definitely tell that McKellen looks younger in particular scenes of the Mr. Holmes trailer than others. Funnily enough, though, even in the "younger" scenes he is still appears to be a couple decades older than the other actors who have been playing the titular character recently.
The Sherlock Holmes character truly has experienced a rather magnificent renaissance on the fiction scene in the past few years. After all we're only a short while removed from Robert Downey Jr.'s big screen turn as the character in Guy Ritchie's pair of adventure films, Sherlock Homes and Sherlock Homes: A Game of Shadows.
Really, though, it's been on television that Arthur Conan Doyle's greatest protagonist has really thrived. Benedict Cumberbatch continues to get rave reviews for his turn in Sherlock, which will be kicking off its fourth series at the end of the year.
But America has its own on-going version as well. Jonny Lee Miller has been playing the great detective since 2010 on Elementary, and the show is set to come back after a week off with a brand new episode airing tomorrow night.
Even given the Sherlock overload we've been experiencing, however, we expect that Mr. Holmes will be delivering a very different kind of flavor that will hopefully make it stick out from the pack. We'll have to wait until the movie hits theaters to find out.
