Pain Bag: The secret of Gary Oldman’s acting expertise
Adopting a method approach to acting isn’t a pre-requisite to becoming renowned as one of the most talented performers of a generation, but Gary Oldman‘s case is just one of many to indicate that it may not be a coincidence that it’s tactic so many of the greats have utilised.
Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Christian Bale, Joaquin Phoenix, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Al Pacino are just some of the names to have gained a reputation for going full-blown method, and every single one of them is both an Academy Award winner and among the most talented dramatic performers to grace the silver screen.
Oldman is very much a part of that club, too, even if it ended up giving him nicotine poisoning after continuously puffing on Winston Churchill’s preferred brand of cigars for his own Oscar-winning tour-de-force in biographical drama Darkest Hour.
While he was never going to spend months immersed in the mindset of the Batman franchise’s James Gordon or Harry Potter‘s Sirius Black, various other roles, including Sid and Nancy‘s Sid Vicious, True Romance‘s Drexl Spivey, Léon: The Professional‘s Norman Stansfield, Hannibal‘s Mason Verger, and Mank‘s Herman J. Mankiewicz all required at least some level of physical, psychological, or personality transformation.
When it comes to tapping into the raw emotionality required for a particularly powerful scene, though, Oldman has developed what he calls his “pain bag”. When attempting to convey the right amount of vulnerability and upset, he’d recall his father walking out on the family when he was a young age, memories of his son Alfie, and his failed marriages to generate a visceral reaction.
“They were just little tricks,” he told GQ. “I should have just kept my mouth shut, I shouldn’t have taken people behind the curtain.” It was far too late to put the curtain back into place, though, leading Oldman to shed some background on how he would reduce himself to emotional rubble in the name of his craft.
“I mean it is very simple,” he continued. “If you break it down. I missed my dad. And so if I had to be sad, I would think about my dad. And it would make me sad”.
It is a fairly straightforward approach on paper, but plumbing such personal depths so often is a delicate undertaking, with Oldman acknowledging that “you’ve kind of got to be crazy” to go to such lengths, even he suggested it wasn’t something he does on every project, despite being “consumed by it more, back then.”
The pain bag may not get brought out every time Oldman steps in front of the camera, but based on the body of work he’s accumulated over the years, it’s hard to state a compelling argument saying that it hasn’t worked.
