His finest glower
How Gary Oldman (who couldn’t look less like the great man) rose to the Churchillian challenge of pulling off...
PUFFING away on a cigar, with that distinctive pudgy chin and high forehead, it could almost be the great man himself.
Yet beneath the remarkably convincing make-up and prosthetics lurks Gary Oldman, who shares almost no physical traits with Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill. Speaking in today’s Event magazine, the gaunt British actor admits that playing Churchill in the new film Darkest Hour – due to be released on January 12 – was a daunting task.
‘It wasn’t the psychological or the intellectual challenge that was the hurdle, it was the physical component. You need only look at me and look at Churchill,’ said Oldman, 59. ‘I had to be able to look in the mirror and see him, or at least the spirit of him, looking back at me.’
Oldman almost turned down the part, but acclaimed make-up artist Kazuhiro Tsuji – who worked on the Planet Of The Apes movies – was persuaded to come out of retirement. He took dozens of casts of Oldman to create not only a face, but a foam body suit that enabled the actor to find a Churchillian posture.
The transformation took four hours to apply each day – then two hours to remove after shooting.
Tsuji said: ‘The hardest part was that Gary has an oval head shape, while Churchill had a more compressed, round face.
‘Gary’s eyes are close to each other, Churchill’s are the opposite. Their proportions and head sizes are completely different.’