The “extraordinary” performance Gary Oldman compared to the best of Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino
It goes without saying that the best actors in the business know a legendary performance when they see one, which left Gary Oldman adamant that he’d witnessed a tour-de-force that was easily comparable to two of the all-time greats at the top of their game.
No slouch in the performative department, either, Oldman’s chameleonic career has seen him embody everything from vengeful villains to kindly father figures, earning him a position as among the best of his generation. He’s been there, done it, and got more than his fair share of t-shirts, so hearing just how mesmerised he was by an instantly iconic turn speaks volumes about how good it really was.
There are certain performances that can be pinpointed as the exact moment a star reaches the next level, and while it was Darkest Hour that put the cherry on top when Oldman won an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, it was as far back as 1986’s Sid and Nancy – only his third film credit – that he announced himself as a force to be reckoned with.
There’s a heavy air of bittersweetness to his praise, though, with the recipient of Oldman’s adulation never getting the chance to reap the benefits of a landmark performance that captured the attention and wasted no time at all embedding itself into the deepest recesses of the pop culture consciousness.
Looking back, it’s laughable to remember there was widespread outrage when Christopher Nolan first announced Heath Ledger as the Joker in the Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight, only for the late actor to fully deserve his posthumous Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. Everyone knew he was a massive talent with boundless potential, but the ‘Clown Prince of Crime’ solidified it.
“There are actors that go along in a career, and it’s as if they’re travelling at subsonic speed, and then you’ll get a movie like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or you’ll get Dog Day Afternoon,” Oldman told Devin Faraci. “And actors like Nicholson and Pacino go through the sound barrier; they don’t do it every time, but an actor in a career will do that if they are lucky; if they’re good.”
Randall P. McMurphy won Nicholson the first Oscar of his career, and Sonny Wortzik reiterated after Serpico and The Godfather that Pacino was the benchmark everybody else had to reach in early 1970s Hollywood. Those respective performances could easily be singled out as the best either legend has ever given. Praise doesn’t come much higher, but Oldman was adamant Ledger was on that pedestal.
“Heath has gone through the sound barrier with this,” he continued. “I think it’s an extraordinary piece of acting. There was a frequency he was tuning into like a broadband or something, he was tuning something, he found something. He tuned into a station that none of us could hear.”
Tragically, Ledger passed away before The Dark Knight had even released, but it’s not as if Oldman was being hyperbolic. It’s one of the 21st century’s most iconic performances, one that he believed was worthy of comparison to a pair of the best ever operating at the peak of their own powers.
