The 2012 movie that made Gary Oldman fear for his life: “They would have killed me”
Gary Oldman’s most notable quality as an actor has been his range, as he is one of the few performers who feels truly chameleonic.
That the same man could win the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ for his classical portrayal of Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the World War II drama Darkest Hour and play ridiculous villains in such 1990s genre flicks as Air Force One, The Fifth Element, and Lost in Space speaks to his skills as an actor. Oldman also makes a remarkable number of films in a given year, and he rarely fails to do something interesting with his roles
Given his aptitude for playing disturbed and troubled characters, he seemed like a natural choice to play a villain in the Batman franchise, as the DC character has one of the best rogues’ galleries in all of comics, but Christopher Nolan made a clever choice in Batman Begins to cast Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon, the one good cop on the Gotham City police force, who becomes an ally to Christian Bale’s Caped Crusader without knowing his identity as Bruce Wayne.
While Oldman gave a terrific performance in the film, he had an even larger role in The Dark Knight, which centred on Batman, Gordon, and District Attorney Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, trying to take down the mob by targeting their cash. The film’s ending featured a tragic choice in which Gordon is forced to tell a lie about Batman in order to preserve Dent’s legacy, and it set up a heavy amount of anticipation for how his story would continue in the sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, which meant everyone involved had to be extremely tight-lipped.
Now, Nolan has always done a great job at masking details about his films in the months leading up to their release, but Oldman suffered a brief crisis in which he thought he had lost the script. “I was in a panic for 20 minutes,” he said, “I thought, ‘Where the hell have I put it?'”
Given how many surprising twists and turns The Dark Knight Rises took, Oldman feared that losing the script could cause Warner Bros and Nolan to lash out at him. “It had my name on it,” he said, “They would have killed me”.
The script eventually surfaced in his hotel room; Oldman had thankfully been able to identify the location of the valuable document, and all the secrets of The Dark Knight Rises were retained until opening weekend. “I’d gone out for dinner, and I had put it in the room between the mattress and the bed, because I couldn’t scrunch it into the safe,” he admitted, “I was half-thinking about something else and shoved it there.”
Expectations for The Dark Knight Rises were above anything that had been seen before in comic book history, and the film managed to deliver a satisfying conclusion, which specifically gave Gordon a powerful moment in which he learns the truth about Batman. Although the extent to which the hype had gotten out of control made it impossible for The Dark Knight Rises to not be considered a disappointment by some corners of the internet, it’s a film that has aged remarkably well.
Given that nearly every other superhero franchise has gone back on their endings in order to revive characters, The Dark Knight Rises is one of the rare contemporary blockbusters that has confidence in being the end of a story.
