The one actor who scared Gary Oldman on set: “He looks like a legend”
There aren’t many actors better at playing scary characters in as many different ways as Gary Oldman, who found himself taken by surprise when the tables were turned.
Whether he was inhaling the scenery as the unhinged Norman Stansfield in Leon: The Professional, scheming to enslave the galaxy in The Fifth Element, or being creepy as hell buried under prosthetics in Hannibal, few are as versatile at making audiences feel uneasy as Oldman.
That’s without even mentioning the quietly sinister and patently ridiculous Drexl Spivey, the ferocious Egor Korshunov hijacking a presidential aircraft in Air Force One, his deliciously dark and seductive Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish gothic fantasy, or JFK‘s Lee Harvey Oswald, either.
Those are just several parts that have helped establish Oldman as one of cinema’s foremost villains, and while he did win an Academy Award for playing the decidedly less threatening Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, he often tends to be at his best when he’s allowed to cut loose and strike fear into the hearts of the heroes.
Not that he’s a one-trick pony, though, with the kindly James Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy making him the straight man in a world full of costume-clad crimefighters and megalomaniacal antagonists. He’s encountered Heath Ledger’s Joker, Tom Hardy’s Bane, and Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow, but it was Christian Bale’s title hero who terrified him the most.
“He changes in the suit, doesn’t he? There’s something quite forbidding about him when he’s on the set with you,” Oldman explained to Movie Web. “When Christian puts on that suit, it’s really there. There’s no added digital anything. It just looks like a movie when he’s got it on. He looks like a legend. He doesn’t look like a person anymore. He looks like Batman.”
Funnily enough, a guy dressed as Batman would tend to end up looking like Batman, but Oldman’s point is easy to infer. The difference between throwing on the costume and actually becoming the character are two very different things, as evidenced by how badly George Clooney foundered when he was slapped with a set of rubber nipples and an awful script in Joel Schumacher’s disastrous Batman & Robin.
Michael Keaton definitely felt like Batman, but opinion varies on whether or not the same can be said about Ben Affleck. Bale embodied it better than most – if not all – of his predecessors and successors, even if the voice of a man trying his best to gargle hot concrete was a strange way of trying to get into character and stay there.
It was enough to leave Oldman taken aback, even more impressive when the majority of his scenes with a costume-clad Bale tended to rely more on exposition than superhero action.
