On December 10, Gary Oldman will accept the Variety prize at the British Independent Film Awards for focusing the international spotlight on the UK, bookending a three-decade career with two British icons: Sid Vicious and Winston Churchill. Though disparate figures, Oldman sees a common thread. 'They're anti-establishment in their very own peculiar way,' he says. 'They're outsiders.'
Oldman relates to being an outsider. He grew up in a crumbling Victorian house on a poor block of South London, which suffered the worst rocket attack of the Blitz, killing 168 people. The war that Churchill persuades Parliament to fight in Darkest Hour had ended 15 years before, but young Oldman still played in bombed-out houses no one could afford to repair. He didn't have an indoor toilet until age 13 and assumed he would become a postman or truck driver.
His artistic flair emerged early: at five, he fashioned a papier-mâché cape to play Dracula, and later a paper keyboard to practice piano. After seeing Malcolm McDowell's film The Raging Moon on television, he decided to become an actor. He auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 16 without having seen a play or read a Shakespeare monologue. The academy rejected him, but he persisted, joining the Young People's Theatre while working as a cleaner, shoe seller, assembly line worker, and even slicing pigs' ears in a slaughterhouse.
His first major on-camera role came in Mike Leigh's TV movie Meantime, playing a skinhead. During filming, co-star Tim Roth threw a milk bottle that shattered on Oldman's head, requiring a hospital visit. Three years later, he played Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy and moved to Hollywood. Oldman insists he has always kept his Britishness, though he has mastered accents from Jamaican to Transylvanian. He describes his career by noting that 'when you're in movies, your life isn't your own.' For Darkest Hour, he was nearly bald and hidden behind prosthetic cheeks, finding it strange not to recognise himself on screen.
Oldman hopes to avoid the quip in Darkest Hour calling Churchill 'an actor in love with the sound of his own voice.' He stresses that Churchill was a flip-flopper disliked by his own party. Two years ago, Oldman presented a Walk of Fame star to his hero, Malcolm McDowell. He still hopes to do a proper comedy before hanging up his boots. 'Just being able to do the job is a wonderful thing,' he says. 'And then if people want to give you prizes at the end of it, my gosh.'
