Gary Oldman came to D.C. to talk about his new film, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Toward the end of the interview Oldman makes a very strange declaration. “I would burn the damn thing, ‘Sid and Nancy,'” he says with some force.
It’s an odd comment for the actor to make because the 1986 film made Gary Oldman’s name. Losing so much weight he was briefly hospitalized, Oldman startled audiences with his painfully raw portrayal of doomed Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious.
“It’s almost like I’ve done nothing in the …” he says, trailing off. “I’ve got to the point now where I would stamp it to the ground.”
But Oldman himself knows that he’s many things to many people. He was Lee Harvey Oswald in 1991’s “JFK.” In 1994 alone, he was the iconic Beethoven (“Immortal Beloved”) and a corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration agent (“The Professional”). The sort of villain in portrayed in that last movie then became something of a specialty.
“It was a few years there where I got a little typecast. It happens to people,” he says matter-of-factly. “You’re kind of at the mercy of the people who are casting you.”
Some actors would be happy to be making money in big Hollywood films. But Oldman has never been that sort of artist — though it was his desire to do something different that led him to two of the biggest franchises going.
“I wanted to turn it around. For the last 10 years, there’s a new generation of people who have only seen me as a good guy, because of Sirius Black and Gordon.” Those are the characters he plays in, respectively, the “Harry Potter” films and the new “Batman” series.
“I had played so many different roles and was on the stage for 10 years, and danced, and sang, and done all of those things you never get asked to do in a film. But I have a very eclectic, strange cross section of fans. When the Potter series started, it went from 40 to four.”
In “Tinker,” Oldman plays George Smiley, the MI6 operative created by novelist John le Carre. “He’s a man you immediately forget,” says director Tomas Alfredson — who went on to describe the challenge of having such a man played by one of the world’s best-known faces.
“It’s not a big disguise. I drabbed myself down,” Oldman saying, noting he dyed his hair gray for the film. “You like to think that because you’re in this profession, you have a bit of charisma and people might want to watch you. And yet, you’re playing someone who basically wants to disappear, like a chameleon, into the furniture or the walls.”
“Chameleon” is the same word Alfredson uses to describe his star. The film almost fell apart before someone came up with the idea of casting Oldman. Alfredson, a European who made the well-regarded Swedish vampire film “Let the Right One In,” might seem a strange choice to adapt a British novel. But he has the same sense of keen intelligence as his source material — and the character around whom it centers. Alfredson doesn’t apologize for a film some viewers have reported getting lost in.
“If you are a le Carre reader, you know this, and it is part of the charm. It should be complicated, and it is complicated,” he says. “I know that people here and there get lost. But it’s all right. You get lost.”
And then, like the film’s star, you find your place once again.
