The Oscar win Gary Oldman predicted seven months before it happened: “He was brilliant”
As Gary Oldman adds another Golden Globe nomination to his collection that he seems to pick up on basically a yearly basis now, this time for his brilliantly ramshackle MI5 officer Jackson Lamb on Apple TV’s Slow Horses, it’s fair to say he reached national treasure level some time ago. But did you know he’s also psychic?
Alright, so that might be slightly stretching the truth. He’s an unbelievable actor, but probably doesn’t have extrasensory perception. What he did do was predict Heath Ledger winning an Academy Award for his role as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight back in 2008, but then he was a first-hand witness to that magic thanks to his part as Commissioner Jim Gordon.
Ledger’s work on that movie, which wrapped filming just two months before the Australian actor was found dead in New York from an apparent overdose, has since passed into legend, but even at the time there was widespread acknowledgement that it was something special; even on set Michael Caine reportedly forgot some of his lines because he was so distracted by what Ledger was doing.
The film was eventually released just over six months after Ledger’s passing, and speaking at the time, Oldman was full of praise for the young actor, saying, “I think he will get a posthumous Oscar nomination, and he could win it. It’s as good a performance as anyone out there has turned in. He was brilliant.”
That, of course, turned out to be the case, Ledger winning not just the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar the following year, which his family collected for him, but a Golden Globe too. In his short career, Ledger had already experienced awards season success, picking up several ‘Best Actor’ nominations for his role as a lovestruck cowboy in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, but it is without doubt The Joker that will stand as his epitaph, one of the finest and most twisted movie villains in cinematic history.
In collecting the posthumous Golden Globe, Nolan himself paid tribute by saying, “After Heath passed on, we saw a hole ripped in the future of cinema.” Oldman, meanwhile, is also a three-time nominated ‘Best Leading Actor’ Oscar winner, finally picking up his Academy Award thanks to his portrayal of Winston Churchill for the historical epic Darkest Hour back in 2018. Most recently, it has been the smash hit Slow Horses that has brought him widespread acclaim, and he is currently filming season six of the show.
In the latest season, there was even an apparent tribute to Ledger’s Batman performance when Jackson Lamb referenced headbutting a pencil on a table, akin to The Joker’s vicious dispatching of a mobster in Nolan’s movie. Aside from more Slow Horses, Oldman will be lending his voice to a major upcoming video game called Squadron 42, which is currently in post-production, and he’ll be getting behind the camera for another kind of horse, this time a flying one, as he’ll direct Flying Horse, a biopic about Eadward Muybridge.
Muybridge is known as a pioneer of moving pictures, an English photographer in the 1800s who invented techniques that allowed still photographs of subjects like animals to be manipulated and combined in order to produce fluid, moving images. Most famously, he was responsible for the ‘horse in motion’ in 1878, which is one of the earliest examples of what we now think of as film.
