The scene that saved Gary Oldman’s life: “I was completely out of it”
Gary Oldman is one of the greatest actors of the past half-century, even though he has never reached the glitzy star status that matinee idols like Leo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt have.
Perhaps this is because he disappears so fully into his characters. It’s hard to imagine DiCaprio or Pitt ever looking like anyone other than themselves, no matter how hard they try to look dishevelled and grimy in the name of acting. Even when huddled in an animal carcass and noshing on raw bison, DiCaprio always looks like DiCaprio.
Despite his illustrious career, which has included an Oscar, a franchise or two, and a host of memorable transformations (who can forget that diabolical soul patch in The Fifth Element?), Oldman has had to contend with plenty of personal struggles.
Alcohol addiction is chief among them. Throughout the early 1990s, as his career was taking off, the Dracula actor was so beholden to his alcoholism that it threatened to stop his ascendancy in its tracks. It was a co-star who finally helped him turn things around.
In 1994, he was starring in an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter opposite Demi Moore. On the day they were supposed to shoot a pivotal scene, he showed up drunk. He muddled his way through, but just barely. “I was completely out of it,” he said in an interview with The Arts Desk three decades later. When he was sober again, he apologised to Moore, expecting her to respond angrily. Instead, she told him that she wasn’t mad; she was just disappointed.
“That was it,” he recalled. “At that moment, I knew I couldn’t go on like that.” He described his subsequent journey to sobriety as the most important thing he ever did, saying that if he hadn’t taken that step, he would have died from his addiction. “Since I stopped drinking, a lot of things have happened that I will always be eternally grateful for,” he said. “I’m not so lonely any more, I’m not lying around in some hotel room, wrecked, living out of a suitcase.”
Interestingly, Moore herself had had a life-saving moment while working on a film a decade before. In her memoir, she recounts how, during the filming of St Elmo’s Fire in the mid-1980s, director Joel Schumacher and Columbia Picture executive Craig Baumgarten practically forced her into going to rehab. More importantly, at least as far as Moore was concerned at the time, they made sure that she kept her role, even though that decision put the whole movie in jeopardy.
Moore probably could not have anticipated the power of her words when she told Oldman that she was disappointed in him during the production of The Scarlet Letter, but she had come full circle, and was paying it forward. Both she and Oldman have spoken openly about their early struggles with addiction during pivotal moments in their careers, and both have attributed their success and longevity to their sobriety.
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life,” Oldman said in the Arts Desk interview. “The most important thing is that I’ve been sober for over 27 years.”
