THE CHURCHILL CHALLENGE BRINGS OSCAR BUZZ
Darkest Hour star talks about bringing surprisingly nimble British icon to life
Actor Gary Oldman knew he’d have to get the look and voice of Winston Churchill right for Darkest Hour, if he had any hope of convincing viewers.
But first he had to get the head movement just so. Churchill, it seems, moved his noggin like a penguin on parade.
“There’s a lot of things of the head he did,” says Oldman, 59, demonstrating what he means during an interview with the Star. “It goes one way, and then it comes back and goes the other way. I started with that.”
Mastering details like this are what makes Oldman a consummate professional, able to animate such disparate characters in his 35-year film and TV career as punker Sid Vicious ( Sid and Nancy), assassin Lee Harvey Oswald ( JFK), wizard Sirius Black ( Harry Potter), and now Churchill in the wartime drama Darkest Hour.
He can also go right back to being Gary Oldman. For this interview during TIFF 2017, where Darkest Hour had its Canadian premiere, Oldman looks relaxed but distinctly nonChurchillian in print shirt, thick black specs, and salt-and-pepper hair and goatee.
Churchill is arguably the toughest of all roles for a British actor, since it’s freighted with memories, expectations and innumerable great performances. Nobody wants to do a bad Churchill, which is why Oldman resisted the role for a year. But he ended up delivering a great one, earning him strong Oscar buzz, and now, he’s eager to talk about it: What a range of roles you’ve had in your career. How do you manage them all?
I’ll tell you what, you know, you go for things sometimes, or look for something, or you think you’re doing something. And then you see it (on screen), and you go, “Oh, well, that didn’t quite work,” or, “I thought I was doing something else there.” You nitpick and you start to sort of pull it apart. I think that because I’m sort of so disguised, I can look at it a little more objectively.
There are things in ( Darkest Hour) where I felt I was going for something and I had a sort of sense memory of what I had read or seen of Churchill. And there are a few moments in there where, yeah, I look at it and go, “That’s pretty good, actually! That’s close!” Your take on Churchill makes the man seem more energetic and fleet of foot than perhaps history recalls him. He turned 66 in 1940, the year of Darkest Hour, and he was the opposite of svelte.
The man was a dynamo. A colossus. I was amazed. I got some news footage of him, which is easy to find if you look for it. There are lovely little pieces of him on a visit to Africa, visiting the troops, and he was skipping around, over rubble, skipping upstairs, you know, like a 30-yearold. I had imagined a much slower man, and a bigger man. In 1940, he wasn’t as round as he became. He became quite robust at the end. We figured that it could have been stress eating. Why did you initially balk at portraying Churchill?
I thought the physical challenge was tough. But I was offered three Churchills (films) in one year. I don’t know how that happens, but sometimes, life is very strange like that. And at some point, I had to sort of sit back and go, “Well, what do they see, that I’m not seeing?” Because you don’t have to look exactly like him, but you’ve got to physically have some kind of spirit or essence of the man. He’s so iconic — it’s those busts and sculptures that worried me. But I’d known Kazuhiro Tsuji, the makeup designer, and I thought if there’s anyone on the planet who can make this work, it’s him. This film bookends Dunkirk for a very fraught moment for Britain and the world in 1940, during the Second World War. How do you account for renewed interest this year in this era?
Maybe it’s something to do with language. Churchill was the epitome, the torch of oratory and language and what language can do, how it can move people. His choice of words, very simple and direct Anglo-Saxon words, could rally a nation. And now we’re in the era of f---ing emojis! You know what I mean? We’ve moved from Churchill’s oratory to where people say, “Tell me what you feel about this with one emoji.” Are we reduced to these stupid symbols? It’s fascinating to watch in Darkest
Hour how Churchill seems to stand alone in his conviction that Hitler is a global menace who can’t be reasoned with and who must be fought.
Pacifism was universal, peace at any cost. And this one lone voice is saying, “I’ve seen it first hand. This guy is killing the Jews and he’s going to come and kill you if you’re not careful. We have to rearm.”
People were war-weary, so (Churchill’s view) was very unpopular . . . But there’s a lot of radical revisionism going on because we’re looking at it through our (2017) prism. This interview has been edited and condensed.