Oldman is perhaps the only actor to play both Lee Harvey Oswald and Pontius Pilate.
Gary Oldman stars in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and the upcoming "The Dark Knight Rises."For more than a quarter of a century, whenever you wanted the different, the dangerous, the other, Gary Oldman was always one of the first actors you called.
A centuries-old vampire? The mad prisoner of Azkaban? Punk rockers, Irish-American gangsters, scheming Southern politicians? Oldman’s done it all, from “Sid and Nancy” to “Lost in Space.”
Well, not quite all of it.
“There are some things I’m never offered,” he says frankly. “People do tend to type you. They’ll say sometimes, ‘Oh, I don’t know — can he do comedy?’
“I say, ‘Did you see me in ‘Dracula’?”
So, over the past few years, Oldman – perhaps the only actor to play both Lee Harvey Oswald and Pontius Pilate – has tried to find a few less hissable, more mainstream parts.
Like Lt. Gordon in “The Dark Knight” series, which brought him to Newark recently for some location work – and gave him the rare chance to play a fairly straightforward hero.
And like George Smiley in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” – not only a hero but an out-and-out lead. That was a pleasant change, Oldman says – as was the firm offer.
“There are the same five or so usual suspects up for any role I might get,” the 53-year-old actor says, during a chat at a Manhattan hotel. “My manager will call and say, ‘Oh, they’re interested in you, but they’re also looking at so-and-so, and so-and-so,’ and so on. This time it was simply, ‘They want you.’ So that was lovely. And that is rare.”
Based on the classic espionage drama by John Le Carré – already filmed once, years ago, for British television – “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is set during the Cold War, when spymaster John Hurt discovers the Soviets have a mole deep within the British Secret Service.
But who is it? The ambitious Toby Jones? The dour Ciaran Hinds? The affable Colin Firth? That’s for Oldman to discover, as he embarks on a real-life game of chess, trying to figure out exactly what pieces and strategies are in play.
Acting the part had its own challenges.
“You don’t really get rehearsals in film,” Oldman says. “You get a bit of blocking, and that’s it. Everything else, you do that yourself, beforehand, in isolation, sitting in your kitchen, reading the script over and over. But ...”
He shrugs.
“I can only do so much in my kitchen,” he says finally. “And I have no idea what Colin’s been doing in his kitchen. And then you get on the set, and go into your first scene together, and you think – Ah! He’s going to do that, then, is he? That’s what makes the job so interesting, and so scary at times – the unknown aspect.”
But what Oldman truly found daunting was who some of those other actors were.
“It was terribly exciting for me to be there with that cast,” Oldman says. “John Hurt particularly – I admire him so much. And while he’s one of the most adorable people you could ever meet, wonderful, wonderful guy, I was incredibly nervous that first day. I’m a bit of a fanboy, actually, when it comes to John Hurt – I’ve loved his work since before I even had the idea of wanting to be an actor.”
Growing up in working-class South London, Oldman’s chief plan for the future was simply survival. His father was a brooder who spent more time at the pub than his job as a welder; when he got home, he spoke with his fists. He finally walked out on the family when Oldman was 7, and a lot of those early memories – the beatings, the booze – provided the inspiration for Oldman’s one movie as director, the savagely dark “Nil by Mouth,” released in 1997.
“I didn’t come from the sort of culture that really produced actors,” Oldman said. “There was music, though – I started around 13 playing the piano, and I taught myself how to play the guitar. But I started a little too late. Maybe not too late but – well, I was musical but I wasn’t really gifted. Acting, though, that was something I simply decided I wanted to do. I don’t know where I got the idea. I just did.”
So, after high school, Oldman started looking for training. The famous Royal Academy of Dramatic Art turned him down – telling him, after his audition, to “find something else to do for a living” – but he won a scholarship to a smaller school. After graduation, he spent most of the next eight years on stage, playing everything.
In 1986, though, he got one of the leads in the film “Sid and Nancy,” a sometimes strangely funny, sometimes surprisingly romantic look at the life of the doomed Sex Pistols bassist and his junkie American girlfriend. It led to other good parts — in “Prick up Your Ears,” in “State of Grace” – and a permanent move to America, and into the heart of Hollywood.
The heart of darkness, too.
To the brink and back
Over the next dozen years, Oldman went through three brief marriages. He also became a drunk, famous for room-service benders, deft at always finding an excuse.
“‘Hey, the sun’s shining, let’s have a martini,’” he said once, remembering his drinking days. “‘Hey, it’s raining, let’s have a bottle of whiskey.’ ‘I’m happy, let’s celebrate.’ ‘I’m sad, let’s drink.’”
It might have frequently clouded his judgment, but you never saw it in his performances, whether it was playing Beethoven in “Immortal Beloved” or an annoying thespian on TV’s “Friends.” Whatever the size of the part, whatever the status of the project, Oldman always approached it committed to making it both entertaining and real.
“I remember growing up in the¤’60s, watching one of the two TV channels we used to get back then,” he says. “And you would see people like Peter Sellers, or Alec Guinness in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ playing all these different characters – that’s what you were exposed to. So I’m not shy about playing some big fantastical character who wears a false nose and has a wig and an accent – it’s all part of our culture.”
He takes a sip of his cappuccino.
“Of course, Brando and Montgomery Clift and Paul Newman and James Dean – that sort of small and intimate style, that attention to minutiae, that’s part of the culture, too,” he says. “But it’s simply another kind of tradition. You don’t always want that realistic style. Dracula, I mean – it’s pretty camp, isn’t it? It’s pretty out there.”
Eventually Oldman himself came back to earth. He checked himself into rehab; he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He married again, to the jazz singer Alexandra Edenborough. He found a new generation of fans by playing Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” franchise (and found a new disciple in the awestruck Daniel Radcliffe, only the latest in a series of co-stars to rave about Oldman’s talent).
And, with “The Dark Knight” series, Oldman finally put the madman and the neurotics aside for a bit to play a quiet, methodical good guy. Lt. Gordon isn’t a flashy character. But for Oldman, at this point in his career, that makes the role all the more exciting – and next year’s “The Dark Knight Rises” something to be truly proud of.
“Chris (Nolan) is too classy to make a third ‘Batman’ just for the sake of it,” Oldman says. “I don’t think he’d fancy that at all. He really had to get something, find a reason and a real story, to make this third one. And he did and it’s wonderful, really. It’s just epic.”
“The Dark Knight Rises” will be Oldman’s 70th screen credit; he’s been acting, on stage and set, for 31 years.
“And it can still be daunting,” he admits. “The phone call comes and, ah, that’s the great thing, you’ve got the part. And then you put down the phone and it’s ‘Oh hell, I’ve got the part! How am I going to play this one?’ And you do the work, and you try to find it, but then there’s that day when you have to go to the set, cold. And you just have to bring it, just burn right from the very first bar.”
The musical reference makes him think of Eric Clapton, who wrote the score for “Nil by Mouth” and has remained a friend.
“I went to see him recently at the Albert Hall,” Oldman says. “He doesn’t like to meet people after the show, he just wants to get in the car and go home, so I went backstage before the concert. And we chatted, and it was very pleasant, and then he said, ‘Oh, sorry, need to tune up now. Show’s about to start.’ Not a nerve in his body. And I went back to my seat, and he walked out on stage and just started playing. It was all as normal as breathing to him.”
He finishes his cappuccino.
“That’s kind of what you want to achieve as an actor,” he says. “The material helps you, of course, and a good director. But you want that kind of effortlessness, that kind of confidence in your craft, and it only comes from doing it for a long time. By now I can look at the script, and it’s like seeing notes on a score. ‘Ah, I see, this passage is a little pianissimo.’ You know? You learn how to play your instrument – and after three decades of doing it I know my instrument very well. I’m a bit of a Stradivarius by now.
“Or a Stratocaster, when need be.”