Gary Oldman’s complicated relationship with acting: “I’m very disrespectful of it”
It’s no secret that Gary Oldman is one of the finest chameleons in cinematic history. The affable Brit consistently pushes himself to disappear into ever-varying roles. In 2017 alone, he played a space-colonising billionaire (The Space Between Us), a ruthless Eastern European despot (The Hitman’s Bodyguard), and Winston Churchill (The Darkest Hour). Now that’s range.
Before he made it big, Oldman was just an ordinary young man, living and working in South East London. One fateful day, he saw Raging Moon. Something about Malcolm McDowell’s performance in that film inspired him to pursue his acting dreams. He began performing in youth groups and paid his dues in a number of plays before making the successful transition into film. This is a pretty standard path for an actor to follow, but, if you ask the man himself, he thinks he did it wrong.
When asked about his relationship with acting itself by Pop Culture Classics, the Academy Award winner had something of a shocking answer. “I’m very disrespectful of it, I suppose,” he claimed. “I don’t really see it as a craft. It’s just something that I do. I’ve never studied it. I’ve never read Stanislavsky. Actually, I read six pages once and got so bored. I thought, ‘That’s what I sort of do instinctively.’ I have a very strange, tempestuous marriage to acting.”
Oldman’s claim to have ‘never studied’ acting isn’t strictly speaking true. Though he did fail to get into the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), who famously told him that he should pursue another career path, he did eventually graduate from Rose Bruford College. After he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in acting, he was the first in his year to find professional work.
As for Konstantin Stanislavski, the iconic Russian theatre scholar, Oldman must have come across his work at drama school, alongside famous Jewish acting teacher Stella Adler. Stanislavski developed his famous ‘system’, which would later develop into what we know today as ‘Method acting’. It requires actors to fully inhabit their characters, ticking a variety of boxes to create a rounded, believable individual. Performers are invited to delve into their characters’ emotional memories, physical actions, historical context, and ‘through line’, the path they need to take to achieve their goal. The technique isn’t for everyone, especially the more extreme elements of Method that have evolved out of it, but it remains a fixture of modern acting tutelage and a key part of the evolution of the craft.
Given Oldman’s penchant for immersing himself in roles, you’d assume that Stanislavski would be right up his street. He has adopted his own variation of ‘the System’, using something he calls his ‘pain bag’. When a part requires him to feel something, the actor can draw on his own experiences to generate the necessary emotion. Oldman has revealed some of the ingredients in his ‘pain bag’ over the years, including growing up with an alcoholic father and his four failed marriages.
He might not be considered a ‘traditional’ actor by some of the snootier members of the profession, but the results Oldman can produce more than speak for themselves. Acting isn’t an exact science. All that matters is how a performer makes an audience feel, regardless of what books they have or haven’t read.
