(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Gary Oldman is one of the most acclaimed British actors of the last four decades, and he has forged a thriving career by mixing leftfield artistic choices with more mainstream fare. For every Dark Knight trilogy or Harry Potter entry he stars in, there is a Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Darkest Hour, for which he landed the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor.’ Fittingly for a man whose career follows such a path, Oldman has always been bracingly honest about why he accepts certain parts and turns down others. In fact, if he did a movie for the money, he has no problem admitting that even when he is on the red carpet at the premiere.
Oldman’s history of being open and honest about the realities of working in Hollywood goes back to his ’90s heyday as cinema’s bad guy du jour. In that decade alone, he played the man who supposedly assassinated John F. Kennedy, the “Prince of Darkness” Dracula, a mentally unhinged DEA agent, a villainous sci-fi industrialist, a terrorist hijacker, and a mad scientist. When asked why he took parts in movies like Air Force One and Lost in Space, Oldman smiled, “I know someone once said to De Niro, ‘Oh, my God, why did you do that movie?’ And he said, ‘I’ll give you 12 million reasons why I did it.’
In 2009, Oldman expanded on his philosophy to GQ, which is nothing if not pragmatic. He mused, “You’ve got to work. It’s not always ideal. Sometimes, that means going against one’s instinct. But the instinct is still there. The instinct is intact. The instinct is good.”
Indeed, over the years, Oldman developed an acting moral code that he applied to his career. Hollywood is an industry that, at its best, has always married art with commerce, so Oldman fits within that structure by endeavouring to give the same amount of effort to a paycheque role as he would a more artistically fulfilling one. He explained, “If you’re going to hire me, I’m going to give you the best I can give you. I might not be doing the job for the right reason, but when I’m there on the day, I’ll give you your money’s worth.”
Fascinatingly, there was a time in his career when Oldman confessed to telling his manager, “Look, I don’t know how one engineers this, but I’d like to do the least amount of work for the most amount of money.” This was in 2001, when he was reeling from the breakdown of his third marriage, which had left him living in Los Angeles with sole custody of his two children. He told GQ, “I just made a decision to be at home more.”
In this period, Oldman admitted to turning down movies that weren’t shooting in LA without reading the scripts because they simply didn’t suit his lifestyle. He also needed to pay the family’s bills and his kids’ school fees, so he admitted, “Things shift because I’ve got responsibilities. You can’t do your starving artist bit: ‘I would never do that.’” In these years, Oldman landed his recurring roles as Jim Gordon in the Dark Knight movies and Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, and they served him well.
By 2014, though, Oldman was still abiding by his guiding principle of giving his absolute best in everything, even if he wasn’t exactly passionate about it – and he admitted as much on the red carpet. At the world premiere of Jose Padilha’s RoboCop at the BFI Imax South Bank cinema in London, Oldman was asked why he wanted to play scientist Doctor Dennett Norton in the film. With characteristic honesty, he answered, “Money. I’m at the mercy of what the industry is making and what comes through my door.”
However, because Oldman doesn’t necessarily see this motivation as bad, he could articulate that the project also intrigued him on another level. He found it fascinating that Padilha, a man who made a career in his native Brazil with documentaries and gritty crime movies, would be making an update of a sci-fi staple like RoboCop.
He mused, “I thought this was an intelligent script, and I love Jose’s point of view. It’s always interesting when you’ve got someone on the outside coming in to make a movie like this, a part of American pop culture.”
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter
Source: The role Gary Oldman only took for the money
