The easiest way to make five movies in a year, according to Gary Oldman: “I’ve crammed them all in”
For an actor, it’s one thing to get to make a movie in Hollywood, it’s quite another to make a lot of them. But then another rung on the ladder above that is to have made a lot of movies that are also very good, like Gary Oldman.
The British star has appeared in over 100 films and TV series in his five-decade career so far since making his bow in a 1982 movie called Remembrance about a group of young Royal Navy cadets scrapping in pubs, and in the process, not only has he picked up an Oscar, but his films have grossed a staggering total of $11billion. He’s quite good at it, is what I’m saying.
But like many actors who have been at the top of the industry for that length of time, not all of his projects have quite been at the standard he might have hoped for. Some of that will have been because, for a long time, he was an actor who needed to take jobs to pay the bills, and others because the basic idea sounded good at the time and only the execution let it down.
Oldman is one of those actors who is able to elevate a movie just through the power of his technique and his chameleonic ability to morph into wildly different characters, and when he’s on song, the results are historic, as anyone who has seen Darkest Hour, Leon, The Dark Knight or even his recent role as Jackson Lamb in Apple’s Slow Horses will attest to.
But there are some films that even he can’t save, and they’re scattered around his more than 40-year career with some regularity. In fact, a few of them came in the same 12 months between the end of 2008 and 2009, when Oldman took on four films and a video game in a year, some of which were great and some of which were… not.
Asked by Female.com about forgotten horror The Unborn, for instance, Oldman said, “I play a rabbi… It was a three-week gig. It was 12 days’ work. Name another one.”
Pushed on kids’ animation Planet 51, Oldman replied, “Voice over, took me a morning,” and regarding the Robert Zemeckis CGI version of A Christmas Carol, he added, “Four days… It’s a whole body capture, performance capture thing. It was interesting.”
Three movies down, none of them particularly good, but Oldman wasn’t finished there. He also made Rain Fall, a lamentable Japanese action thriller. Of that one, he said, “Yeah, Rain Fall, ten days. I’m the head of the CIA substation out in Tokyo.”
Rounding things off that year for Oldman was a video game rather than a movie, called Legends of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, with the British actor explaining, “Yeah… these don’t take me very long, and the rest of the time I’ve not been doing anything, I’ve crammed them all in.”
All in all, for about six weeks’ work, Oldman would have pulled in a fair bit of cash in 2009, all spent on projects nobody really remembers too well. But he was also in the midst of his run as Sirius in the Harry Potter movies too, and he made up for it with 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for which he won the first of his three Academy Award nominations.
