The forgotten Gary Oldman performance Leonardo DiCaprio says “inspired an entire generation”
In September 1990, a generation-defining gangster movie was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. It told the story of a group of mobsters navigating their way through the criminal underworld, and featured a firebrand supporting performance by an actor at the top of their game. Audiences and critics rapturously received the film, and that unhinged, captivating supporting turn landed the star a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Academy Award. The movie was, of course, Goodfellas, and the Oscar winner Joe Pesci, but decades later, this wasn’t the performance Leonardo DiCaprio picked out as an influence on an entire generation. Instead, that turn came from Gary Oldman in an incredibly similarly-themed film released the same week as Scorsese’s magnum opus.
In 1986, Oldman exploded into the consciousness of British cinema fans when he played the ill-fated Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. He soon caught the eye of Hollywood and found himself starring in the potboiler legal thriller Criminal Law and Dennis Hopper’s drama Chattahoochee. Neither of those films made much of a dent at the box office, but Oldman likely had much higher hopes for his next movie, which would see him starring alongside Hollywood bad boy Sean Penn, Ed Harris, and Robin Wright.
Indeed, Oldman’s character in State of Grace, which was shot on location in New York City, had the potential to be the kind of breakout role that straps a rocket to an actor’s career. He played low-level hood Jackie Flannery, a member of an Irish gang in the rough and tumble Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood, who was as unpredictable and volatile as they come. The part allowed Oldman to display the fierce intensity, explosiveness, and heart-on-his-sleeve emotiveness he excelled at as a young actor.
Director Phil Joanou was astonished by what he saw from Oldman on-set, and told Interview magazine that it seemed like the actor had immediately inhabited the character based purely on intuition. “It was completely instinctual,” he gushed. “His technique was almost invisible—you couldn’t even figure out if there was one. But from the way he understood everything about Jackie, how he’d behave and speak and move, it was almost as if he’d lived in Hell’s Kitchen for three months.”
From Oldman’s perspective, he agreed with Joanou that he approached Flannery almost entirely on an emotional level, and didn’t try to overthink or intellectualise the role. In fact, he pretty much admitted to making it up as he went along. “When I said I’d do it, I was bullshitting my way through the whole fucking thing,” Oldman chuckled. “I mean, I didn’t know I could do this character. He just sort of came. He just sort of appeared—very late on, actually. Right before shooting.”
Sadly, despite Oldman’s performance receiving a ton of critical praise, it didn’t help State of Grace when it was released in a marketplace overwhelmingly enamoured with Scorsese’s iconic Mafia epic. The movie made a chastening $1.9million at the box office, a mere fraction of Goodfellas’ $47.1million haul.
However, over the years, it developed a significant cult following, and one of its many fans was DiCaprio, who shouted out Oldman’s performance during an acceptance speech at the Baftas in 2016. “I’ve been so influenced by so many British actors throughout the years,” the Revenant star gushed. “I remember watching Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner when I was 15 years old with my
father, all the way to Gary Oldman and State of Grace, which influenced an entire generation of actors.”
DiCaprio’s kind words were validation for a performance and a film that could have been lost to time, but has been kept alive by an ever-growing, ever-dedicated fanbase. It was a deep cut by the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star, but one that makes perfect sense when you watch State of Grace and notice flickers of the countless intense, explosive young stars that have come along in its wake.
