Queer Villain Spotlight: Richard III (Richard III)

Ian McKellen's villain is delicious, sadistic, and desirable--in other words, the paradigmatic queer villain.

There’s something deliciously pleasurable about Richard III, the 1995 film based on one of the most famous of Shakespeare plays. To begin with, there’s the film’s notable shift of the play’s original setting. Rather than medieval England in the throes of the Wars of the Roses, it takes place instead in a gritty, darker world of an alternate 1930s, with Richard figured as a fascist-in-waiting. Moreover, there is also something bitingly pleasing about McKellen’s interpretation of the character who, it should come as no surprise, has something more than a little queer about him. Though McKellen would go on to receive much-deserved praise for such roles as James Whale in Gods and Monsters, Magneto in the X-Men films and, of course, Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, it’s Richard III that I find the most astonishing and ravishing of his on-screen performances. 

At first, it appears that Richard is as straight as they come. Hardly has his brother Clarence been sent to prison in the Tower than he is already scheming to procure said brother’s wife, Anne Neville, wooing her even as she mourns her dead father (whom Richard has been responsible for killing). As the film races toward its conclusion, he also makes overtures toward his own niece, Princess Elizabeth, even while using her as a bargaining chip in his continuing conflict with Annette Bening’s Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of King Edward. Richard is very clear-eyed about how power works in this world and, in his eyes, women are a key part of how influence can be stored up and wielded.

However, there’s something more than a little fey about McKellen’s Richard, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his performance dives headfirst into camp. Again and again, he transforms the title character’s nefarious monologues–in which Richard turns away from the action to speak conspiratorially to the viewer about his malicious intentions–into mustache-twirling expositions of villainy, like something straight out of a stage melodrama of the 19th century. Through these monologues, he constantly draws the viewer into his nefarious schemes, making us at once complicit and powerless as we can but stand by and watch (with, I think, a certain quivering, nervous pleasure) as he schemes, murders, and manipulates his way onto his brother’s throne. 

McKellen’s Richard is also very capable of cruising when the mood suits him, as we can clearly see when he first encounters Tyrell, the henchman who will go on to do much of Richard’s dirty work for him. They first meet in the stables, where Tyrell is feeding a boar some apples. When he tells Richard that he is his “obedient” servant, he responds with a very suggestive “Are you, indeed?”  The lines, of course, are drawn from Shakespeare, but the knowing looks between the two characters, suggests that there is more here than immediately meets the eye; if this isn’t a meeting of an effete princeling and a bit of rough trade, then I don’t know what is. As he does throughout the play, Richard flaunts his refusal to act as a man should; for him, appetite–whether for power or pleasure–is paramount.

It is also notable that Richard, in keeping with Shakespeare’s depiction, has a visible disability. Though it’s not the notable hunchback that would become so key the popular image of the last Plantagenet king, it still plays a key role in his story, and he makes a point of displaying his twisted hand during a meeting of this council. Much has been written about the extent to which McKellen’s disabled Richard is a preening middle finger to the world of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, with Richard McCruer going on to propose that there is even something vibrantly sexy about this iteration of the character. It’s not hard to see why he would feel this way. McKellen is sexy, both in the sense that he is beautiful to look but also, just as significantly, because he so clearly savors this opportunity to play evil incarnate. He makes no apologies for either his actions or his body. He lives life on his own terms, and to hell with anyone who thinks badly of or condemns him for doing so. 

What I wrote last week about Phillip and Brandon of Rope is also true of Richard; he is by far the most compelling and fascinating character in the entire film, far more so than his brother, Edward, or any of those who try to work against him. What’s more, he is utterly irredeemable. After all, it’s not enough that he is willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone on his ascent to power; he also takes vicious pleasure in doing so, whether it’s dispensing his henchman Tyrell to do away with his nephews or making sure that even his erstwhile ally Buckingham is suitably punished for his betrayal. MD Friedman has gone so far as to refer to Richard’s preoccupation with taking pleasure in death as homociphilia, a neologism that nicely captures the phenomenon. 

Unlike Rope, however, there is not even a faint whiff of ambiguity to the conclusion of Richard III. Faced with inevitable defeat the hands of Richmond, Richard decides that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven and, in fine theatrical fashion, throws himself into an inferno, his face twisted into an unsettling smile as Al Jolson’s “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” plays on the soundtrack. This is in many ways a fitting conclusion to Richard III’s story, since from the beginning this queer figure has been equated with death and dismemberment. In seizing control of the method of his own death rather than submitting himself to the humiliation that Richmond would no doubt inflict on his dead body–a fate the real Richard III was unable to avoid–the film’s version of the character has more agency than in the original play. He is, moreover, the very embodiment of the queer death drive as theorized by Lee Edelman. Or, to put it slightly differently, he is also a very queer sort of failure–as a monarch, as a man, as a villain–which makes him fit very neatly into Jack Halberstam’s notion of queer failure as a rebellious act. The joy that Richard takes in this final is sublime in its execution. 

There’s a power in Richard III, I think, one that emerges from its potent and biting queer antisociality. Rather than trying to recuperate or put a nice spin on Richard III and his actions, this adaptation leans right into, even going so far as to draw attention to the homoeroticism always latent in fascism. Obviously we would never want to imitate Richard in the real world but, for the time that we spend with him,  we can simply embrace the dark and desirable villain, even as we also indulge those parts of ourselves.