McKellen became an official of the Universal Life Church to perform the ceremony and the two men, whose careers ran along parallel lines but who didn’t really know each other until they appeared in the first X-Men film, have become firm friends. They have, says Stewart, spent almost the entire past 12 months together. “We were in Montreal filming X-Men for nearly five weeks then we came to New York to begin rehearsing Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land; then we went to Berkeley, California, for two more weeks’ rehearsal, then we performed it there for six weeks; I got married and we came back to New York and began rehearsing Waiting for Godot and we played that on Broadway for almost six months.”