The one thing Gary Oldman will never do on a movie set: “I realise it’s just an illusion”
Gary Oldman is one of the most fascinating actors to have worked in Hollywood over the past four decades. The Londoner, who has claimed he never formally studied acting, instead relies on instinct, especially in the early stages of his career. He trusted his natural inclinations to inhabit a character, but his process depended on avoiding one specific thing on set – something he believed could bring everything crashing down.
In truth, Oldman’s claim that he never studied acting isn’t quite the whole truth, even if it’s easy to understand what he means by it. He was just a regular East End boy who never had any dreams of performing, but then he saw a film that changed his life: The Raging Moon. That movie starred Malcolm McDowell as an amateur footballer struck down by a degenerative disease that cost him the use of his legs, and the young star’s performance transfixed Oldman.
Oldman subsequently got involved in his local youth theatre and later attended Rose Bruford College to learn the craft of acting. This obviously counts as studying the craft, but Oldman is adamant that he approached his studies in a uniquely personal manner. For instance, he once said, “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.'”
So, by the time Oldman made it to Hollywood in the late 1980s, he considered himself less formally trained than some of his contemporaries. However, he knew exactly how he wanted to approach finding a character. Ironically, it was a hodgepodge of his instincts and Stanislavski’s famous “system”, which later developed into what we know today as method acting. Within this process, though, Oldman discovered early on that it didn’t help him to watch dailies at the end of each shooting day. Instead, it poked holes in the reality of the character that he’d built for himself.
“I like to believe that I’m really there, that I’m in the same situation as this character,” Oldman told Interview magazine in 1990. “And if I then see it, I realise it’s just an illusion. It spoils it, because I can be objective and monitor myself. A little someone nudges me and says, ‘It’s only a movie.’ It takes the wind out of my sails. I realise it’s artifice; that it’s make-believe; that I’m not that man.”
From then on, Oldman resolved that he would never watch dailies while making a film, even if his co-stars were doing it or a director invited him to do so. It didn’t mean he was being rude or awkward, though, and State of Grace director Phil Joanou was one of his first helmers to realise that and work with Oldman to extract his best performance, instead of working against him.
“Nothing was really bashed out and intellectualised,” Oldman said of shooting that 1990 cult classic gangster movie. “I think filmmaking should be a wonderfully free collaborative process, and it so very rarely is. I often see directors as jailers of my talent. But this was a give-and-take situation.”
