Aside from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow, very little is known about Sherlock Holmes later years. Mr. Holmes answers that question.
[toggler title=”TL;DR” ]A lot of fans of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series have always wondered what the famous private investigators last years were like. Mr. Holmes is Ian McKellen and Bill Condon’s personal answer to that question.[/toggler]
[dropcap size=small]T[/dropcap]here are plenty of fan theories about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes final years, but no one has ever produced a movie that answers that question. The only clue that we have is Watson’s famous statement in His Last Bow. “We heard of you as living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs,” Dr. Watson tells Holmes in the last installment of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories.
Mr. Holmes is Bill Condon’s personal take on Sherlock Holmes’ later years and a fairly good one at that. Combining Ian McKellen’s fantastic acting abilities and the actor’s chemistry with the director, you can be sure that the indie film will be superb. The film will also do very well in theaters, thanks in-part to BBC’s incredibly popular mini-series Sherlock (which also jump started Benedict Cumberbatch in the process) and Robert Downey Jr.’s two films with Jude Law that made over $1 billion worldwide. But this film will be different according to Ian McKellen, because he will be portraying Sherlock Holmes in a different way unlike most actors before him.
“The fun of it is that everyone thinks they’ve known who Sherlock Holmes is,” he says. “I’m nothing like the Sherlock Holmes that my friend John Watson made in the books that he wrote about me. I never smoke a pipe, I much prefer cigars, and I never wore a deerstalker. Whereas as Gandalf, we slavishly followed the images, not that Tolkien had written, but that the famous illustrators of the novels, Alan Lee and John Howe, had put down.”
While Ian McKellen may be portraying a different Sherlock Holmes that most of us are unfamiliar with, he will still be Sherlock Holmes at his core. In the film he will use his memory banks to go over past cases and clues to solve his latest one, and he will always be carrying around his magnifying glass. Not only that, but according to Bill Condon he will still be the self-absorbed individual that we have all come to love.
Overall it sounds like Mr. Holmes, while a small indie film, will be packing plenty of talent and fans of the short stories may feel satisfied with the answer to the question of what Sherlock Holmes’ final years were like.
Mr. Holmes will be released in specific theaters on July 17th.
