Oldman adjusting to all that prize fuss
For someone who has been winning as much as Gary Oldman has these past few months — a Golden Globe, a SAG Awards honor, tributes at the Santa Barbara and Palm Springs film festivals, and countless other prizes for his turn as Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour” — the idea of loss never seems far from the 59-year-old actor’s mind.
Primarily, this wistfulness arrives when thoughts turn to the two sons — Gulliver, 20, and Charlie, 18 — he raised as a single parent and who still live with him in Los Feliz, Calif., but won’t for much longer because, as he knows, as all parents know, “you have to let them go.”
Shown a family photo that Charlie posted on his Instagram account from a party shortly after the Golden Globes, Oldman looks at the image for a couple of minutes, bathing in the memory. Even after he finishes talking about it, he only reluctantly breaks his gaze.
“I’d left my phone in the car, so I hadn’t had any kind of notification from them,” he says. “I was sitting at the Focus after-party and felt somebody tap me on the shoulder, and I turned around and it was Charlie and Gulliver dressed in their finest, just with big smiles on their faces. It meant more to me than the prize. Do you know what I mean?” Oldman pauses, dabbing his eyes with a linen napkin.
When Oldman burst on the scene in the 1980s playing punk rocker Sid Vicious in “Sid & Nancy,” gay British playwright Joe Orton in Stephen Frears’ “Prick Up Your Ears” and a soccer hooligan in Alan Clarke’s BBC television drama “The Firm,” critics and audiences were taken aback by performances that were fearless, frightening, funny and completely dissimilar.
“To be young when Gary’s work was coming out was heaven,” says Ben Mendelsohn, who plays King George in “Darkest Hour.” “To watch him then was to wonder: ‘How … does he do it?’ ”
Oldman’s towering, transformative turn in “Darkest Hour” is miles apart from his other Oscarnominated performance, playing George Smiley, the impassive, inscrutable British secret service agent in 2011’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
“This has all taken some getting used to,” Oldman says, reflecting on the conveyor belt he has been on the last few months. “I’m quite a private person. I’ve never been any good with crowds. It’s all very nice. No complaints. But there’s an energy of people coming at you that you absorb. It’s quite frenetic. The night of the Golden Globes, I must have taken 300 selfies, and it felt like I had met 1,000 people. And they’re all lovely and gracious and well-meaning . ... One should never take for granted the sound of applause.” Feb. 18 birthdays: Author Toni Morrison is 87. Vocalist Yoko Ono is 85. Actress Cybill Shepherd is 68. Singer Randy Crawford is 66. Actor John Travolta is 64. Game-show hostess Vanna White is 61. Rapper Dr. Dre is 53. Actress Molly Ringwald is 50.