As Churchill, Oldman performs his greatest disappearing act yet
TORONTO — It’s a long distance from Sid Vicious to Winston Churchill, and a greater leap, still, from Dracula to “Darkest Hour.”
Gary Oldman, character-actor maverick, has taken up perhaps his biggest
— and most buttoneddown — challenge. For even a veteran chameleon like Oldman who has a way of hiding in plain sight, the task of tackling such a heroic titan of 20th century history is a leap. If he can disappear behind just glasses (2011’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”) or merely a mustache (1989’s “The Firm”), what feats of transformation can he accomplish with a pile of prosthetics and a heap of makeup?
The answer is a swaggering, full-throated metamorphosis that has made Oldman the early favorite to win best actor at the Oscars. It’s a part that Oldman grants is a personal mountain peak.
“It’s sort of like my Lear,” Oldman said in an interview over coffee. “And I don’t rule that out. There are some parts still left in the ol’ boy.”
An Academy Awards nomination would be only the second for the 59-year-old Oldman. (He was nominated for “Tinker Tailor.”) His shape-shifting career and preference for privacy has sometimes kept him out of the spotlight, even while his explosive ferocity (“Leon: The Professional,” “State of Grace,” “True Romance”) made him a thespian idol.
That Oldman is an actor’s actor is fitting in the case of “Darkest Hour.” Director Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Pride & Prejudice”) depicts Churchill as an actor, himself, who’s playing a part. With a Homberg hat and cigar as his costume, he rallies 1940 Britain against pacifism in the face of Adolf Hitler. Churchill, an unpopular figure when he became prime minister, is captured in private self-doubt and public grandeur, as he prods Parliament in famous speeches, like when he warned that with inaction Britain would “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister”
“Our film is about oratory and how words can galvanize the people and move them and rally them. Even simple, direct Anglo-Saxon words,” Oldman said. “I felt it was refreshing because we’ve now got to a world where we communicate with emojis. If Churchill saw an emoji, I think he’d turn in his bloody grave.”
“Darkest Hour” spans just 28 days, when Churchill is thrust into power and Germany is invading France. That Churchill has been so frequently played — among them Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Brian Cox and John Lithgow — gave Oldman pause, since they had, he says, “contaminated” his and our impression of the man.
“I danced around it for a long time. I think I was afraid, to be honest with you,” Oldman said. “But at the end of the day I couldn’t give up saying those words. And what’s the worst that can happen? You stink. They’re not going to come arrest you or shoot you. I thought: Jump off the cliff and see what happens.”