Gary Oldman names the single worst movie of his career: “Possibly the worst movie ever made”
It’s always easy to tell when an actor like Gary Oldman is making a movie solely for the money, but when you’re as good as he is, turning up for the paycheque doesn’t automatically mean he’s phoning it in.
The Academy Award winner admitted that the main reasons he boarded the Harry Potter franchise and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy were because, as a recently divorced single father, he needed to do the least amount of work for the maximum amount of money, and those films provided both.
Nobody would accuse him of going through the motions as Sirius Black or James Gordon, apart from maybe Oldman himself, and those are far from the only examples. After all, you don’t antagonise Harrison Ford as a scenery-chewing Russian villain or wear a ludicrous wig and costume in a Luc Besson sci-fi to stretch those dramatic muscles, but he was deliciously evil in both.
There are exceptions, because it’s hard to mount a passionate or even reasonable defence of the star showing up in forgettable fare like Killers Anonymous, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, and Planet 51 for reasons other than the dollar signs flashing in his eyes, but at least he was honest about the RoboCop remake.
One of the worst things he’s ever been in is undoubtedly Tiptoes, the jaw-droppingly misguided dramedy where he and Matthew McConaughey play twins, albeit with Oldman’s character being a dwarf. It was a head-scratching decision until he held his hands up and confessed that it was a purely financial call, not that it was hard to figure out.
However, that isn’t the Gary Oldman film that Gary Oldman would rank as the worst Gary Oldman movie to ever exist, with that honour instead being reserved for a bargain-basement crime thriller that never saw the inside of a cinema, and coincidentally released little over a month before Tiptoes.
Does anyone remember Sin, director Michael Stevens’ hard-boiled genre flick that finds Ving Rhames’ retired police officer being targeted by Oldman’s underworld kingpin as the ex-cop hunts down his missing sister in Reno, Nevada? The Slow Horses figurehead does, and he didn’t have nice things to say.
“Oh god, that’s possibly the worst movie ever made,” he told Time Out. “I even felt sorry for the trees they cut down for the script paper. I hadn’t worked; I needed some money after the divorce. If you’re a connoisseur of the terrible, you might get a twisted joy out of it.”
Making Tiptoes and Sin back-to-back remains the undoubted nadir of Oldman’s career, and he knows it, since he was chasing the cash. Fortunately, it didn’t take him long to get back on track, since his next two credits came in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Batman Begins.
