The actor Gary Oldman said perfected “absolute simplicity”
Ask film fans about their favourite Gary Oldman performances, and a few likely candidates are bound to emerge. There will be those who love his powerful, strident Oscar-winning performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Others may pick one of his villain roles from ’90s action movies like Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, or his turn as the Prince of Darkness in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They may even choose a modern franchise part like Sirius Black in Harry Potter.
Something that can’t be said about many of these roles is that they are studies in “absolute simplicity.” When Oldman first came to fame, he was more likely to blow his co-stars off the screen with intensity and fierce emotion than to embrace a quiet, contemplative character. Think of the dreadlocked drug dealer Drexl Spivey in True Romance or the twitchy gangster Jackie Flannery in State of Grace. These explosive roles seemed to sear the screen with their unpredictable energy, which is what Oldman became known for.
However, as his career developed over the next several decades, Oldman tried to provide some light and shade to his filmography. He even swore off villainous roles for a while, and in 2011, he took on his quietest, most introspective part yet: George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This ageing espionage master was an opportunity for Oldman to show he didn’t need to rely on his usual pyrotechnics, and instead, could compel an audience by virtually doing nothing.
“It felt like what we call proper work, and that’s not to make the other work sound less good,” a thoughtful Oldman told Time Out. “It was just a joy to be asked to play something as quiet as this and to run a scene from a passive position rather than physicalise the feelings and the emotions, which I’ve sometimes been asked to do.” He felt Smiley was a “distant cousin” to Jim Gordon, the world-weary police commissioner he played in The Dark Knight Trilogy, who was similarly quiet. In some ways, Gordon could be seen as a trial run for Oldman to reach Smiley’s serene, unassuming brilliance.
In truth, Oldman has long been honest that he didn’t necessarily want to always play entertainingly exaggerated characters with inflated personalities and a penchant for screaming lines of dialogue at the top of their lungs. However, Hollywood is a business, first and foremost, and that is what the industry kept hiring him for. By contrast, he has always loved stillness in actors, and marvelled at the stars who could communicate multitudes while seemingly doing very little.
“My taste is very wide,” Oldman once said. “I love Cary Grant. I love the absolute simplicity of Gary Cooper.”
While Grant was an intriguing name for Oldman to mention, namechecking Cooper spoke most fascinatingly to what he was trying to achieve when he played Smiley and Gordon. The Academy Award-winning star of High Noon and Mr Deeds Goes to Town was famed for his ability to underplay and capture audiences’ imaginations with layered physicality and minimal dialogue. In an ‘Old Hollywood’ era that favoured ‘ACTING’ – with a capital ‘A’ – Cooper bucked the trend by consistently taking his performances down to their core elements.
Indeed, it was said that Cooper was one of the first movie stars to realise that motion picture acting could be very different from stage acting, and that the camera was capable of picking up the most subtle movements of his face and body. His peers and directors were sometimes shocked by how little he appeared to be doing, but when they saw the dailies, they couldn’t deny his approach resulted in a disarmingly complex, naturalistic performance. In the end, Oldman’s “absolute simplicity” verdict was bang on the money.
