The role that brought Gary Oldman full circle: “In a very real sense, it is like coming home”
Much as Gary Oldman was already a British institution as one of the finest actors ever to emerge from these fair isles with a huge back catalogue of award-winning work, many believe that his recent performance as Jackson Lamb in the acclaimed Apple TV+ spy thriller Slow Horses ranks up there with his best.
As the head of a gang of MI5 misfits at Slough House, Oldman’s foul-mouthed, flatulent boss is an unlikely hero but ties the show together brilliantly in a role that has earned him Emmy, Golden Globe and Bafta award nominations to go with the ‘Best Actor’ Oscar he picked up back in 2018 for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
And it’s a sign that if anything, the actor seems to somehow be getting better and better as his career progresses, amazing really when you consider that he was already not just scene-stealing but movie-ruling as far back as ‘90s classics including Léon, The Fifth Element and his own absolutely harrowing drama Nil by Mouth, which he wrote, produced and directed.
Given Oldman was showing he could do it all himself 30 years ago, perhaps it’s not surprising that this year he decided to do a one-man show on stage in York, taking on Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, a one-act play penned in 1958, which features just one actor for the duration.
Talking about the production to Beyond, he said, “My professional public acting debut was on the stage at the York Theatre Royal, and for me, it is the completion of a circle, as it is where it all began. In a very real sense, for me, it is like coming home, and the combination of York and Krapp’s Last Tape is all the more poignant because it is a play about a man returning to his past of 30 years earlier.”
Oldman began his career in the late ’70s in various plays on stage, going on to win several awards at the start of the next decade and joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was spotted on stage by the film director Alex Cox, which led to his being cast in the lead role for the Sid and Nancy punk biopic in 1986.
A string of film roles then followed, including the gritty football hooligan movie The Firm and a Hollywood movie with Sean Penn called State of Grace, a neo-noir drama with similar themes to Goodfellas, released the same year. Then, thanks to 1991’s Oliver Stone blockbuster JFK, Oldman really began to get noticed on a global scale, his performance as the shooter Lee Harvey Oswald a stand-out in the three-hour conspiracy epic, and it led to his being cast as Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s titular big-budget horror.
He has been part of the A-list of actors ever since, with the 1990s seeing him featured in hugely successful movies, and he picked up a reputation for playing fearsome, exuberant bad guys like the Russian terrorist Egor Korshunov in Harrison Ford’s Air Force One, before the 2000s saw him star in several Harry Potter movies as godfather Sirius Black.
Aside from filming more Slow Horses, which has been renewed for a sixth and seventh season, Oldman will also be seen in a major video game called Squadron 42 alongside Star Wars legend Mark Hamill and fellow British thesp Mark Strong.
