The performance that makes Gary Oldman want to “throw the television out the window”
Every aspiring actor could learn more than a thing or two by combing through Gary Oldman’s back catalogue for inspiration, but one person who wouldn’t be caught dead sifting through the actor’s array of credits is Gary Oldman, who generally can’t stand watching himself.
He must have been doing something right when the likes of Tom Hardy, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Hugh Jackman have all cited him as a major influence, but the Academy Award-winning knight of the realm can’t handle the cringe of seeing his younger self onscreen.
It isn’t strictly limited to his fresh-faced days, though, with Oldman taking his job so seriously that he slated his own acting in the Harry Potter franchise, even though it wouldn’t be doing the series a disservice to suggest that the majority of esteemed British thespians who passed through the eight-film saga at one point or another hardly brought their A-game.
He used to hate Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element with an intense and burning desire, but he got over it, although he doesn’t seem likely to change his mind on Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy any time soon. It was his breakthrough big-screen performance that made everyone sit up and take notice that a potential generation talent was in their midst, but Oldman bristles at the mere mention of it, never mind the sight.
“If it comes on TV and I’m channel surfing and I see a second of it, I want to just throw the television out of the window,” he told Yahoo. “I had no interest in the Sex Pistols. I looked at it and thought, ‘Why? Why would you make a movie about these people? But it’s got its charms, great things in it. It’s Roger Deakins’ cinematography, one of his early films. But it’s just old stuff now, for me.”
The soon-to-be legendary cinematographer gets a pass, but everything else? Not so much. If Oldman had no interest in the Sex Pistols, their stories away from their short and controversial existence, or the notion of a feature-length story being told about one of their members, then why did he agree to star in it in the first place, especially when his opinion hasn’t changed in the last four decades?
The short answer is that he was a largely unknown actor at the time, and his agent told him to. Cox revealed that Daniel Day-Lewis was his first choice for Sid Vicious, but after seeing Oldman perform on stage, he rocketed to the top of the list. However, he turned it down twice because he wasn’t sold on the script, but the promise of his biggest payday yet, and the fact that his team “put a lot of pressure and bullied me into it” swayed his decision.
This being Oldman, of course, he was phenomenal in the lead. He didn’t care about the material, and he didn’t really want to make Sid and Nancy at all, but because he’s that good, he still managed to deliver a tour de force that helped put his name on the map as one of British cinema’s most undeniable rising stars.
