The legendary actor who haunted one of Gary Oldman’s greatest performances
He is one of the greatest actors the British Isles have ever produced, but Gary Oldman is just as fragile as the rest of us. During one particular movie, Oldman would be struck down by stage fright after the ghost of another actor lodged itself firmly in his brain.
You wouldn’t think that someone as talented and revered as Oldman has ever experienced imposter syndrome, but there was a time when he seriously questioned whether he was right for a role, although that didn’t stop him from earning an Oscar nomination for his performance. The truth is, it was the previous performance of the role that left him shaking in his boots.
The actor, who started his career in the early 1980s with roles in the likes of Mike Leigh’s gritty social realist film Meantime and Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, playing the troublesome Sex Pistols bassist, broke into Hollywood in the 1990s with roles in True Romance, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Leon: The Professional, proving himself to be an incredibly versatile star.
Fantastic at playing villainous types, Oldman was able to transform himself into pimps and corrupt DEA agents as much as he could do sci-fi roles in the likes of The Fifth Element and Lost in Space. Into the 2000s, he raised his star profile with roles in series like Harry Potter and the Dark Knight trilogy, and he has since won an Oscar after he portrayed Winston Churchill in the 2017 film Darkest Hour.
His first nomination came in 2011, however, when he earned a ‘Best Actor’ nod for portraying George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. While he might have lost out to Jean Dujardin for The Artist, Oldman’s performance was undeniably incredible, and it’s hard to believe that Oldman ever had “stage fright” over the role.
Yet, even the most acclaimed actors in the industry evidently struggle with such feelings, with Oldman revealing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he felt like a “fraud”.
He explained, “Once I got on set I was okay. It was the buildup to it. I’d never really experienced it,” continuing, “I don’t know whether it’s nerves or adrenaline or whatever – it’s excitement – there’s a difference between being paralysed with fear, which stage fright is really in a sense. There’s a difference between that and just being energised and excited to get out there.”
For Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, however, “It was bone-crushing. I wouldn’t want to experience it again.”
For Oldman, impostor syndrome is pretty common when he takes on a role, stating that he often goes “kicking and screaming” into a job. He explained that he’s usually thinking, “I can’t do that, I’ll never be able to do that, or they should cast someone else, or, you know, I could think of another actor who could play that role, and why are they thinking of me?”
When it came down to it, Oldman was too afraid that he wouldn’t do the role justice, which Alec Guinness had played to perfection in the series of the same name decades before. “I really did feel that this time, I’d get found out,” he said, worrying that he would be seen as a fraud. The “ghost of Guinness” lingered over him and convinced him he was going to fail, to the point of being unable to eat or sleep, but luckily, he was able to hold his own, and he soon earned widespread acclaim for his own interpretation of Smiley.
Guinness delivers a masterful performance as Smiley, providing some solemn solace as the quiet, introspective British intelligence officer drawn out of retirement to unearth a Soviet mole. The veteran plays Smiley with quiet precision and emotional restraint, embodying the weariness and moral complexity of a man navigating betrayal and shifting loyalties. His subtle expressions and deliberate pacing reveal a deeply contemplative mind, making Smiley both enigmatic and profoundly human.
While it is nice to know Oldman struggled with the presence of another actor’s performance, showing he is human after all, it is also worth acknowledging that just about anyone would have been haunted by Alec Guinness in their role.
