The one person so evil that Gary Oldman refused to play them: “Too much karma around that”
Gary Oldman is more than comfortable playing the bad guy. In fact, overwhelmingly, he’s made a career out of it as a good majority of his most iconic roles have come in the form of villains.
Sometimes it’s fictional villains, like the cruel drug lord Norman Stansfield in Léon: The Professional, the repugnant Mason Verger in Hannibal, or the abusive pimp and gang leader Drexl Spivey in True Romance. But also, Oldman isn’t afraid of taking on the challenge that scares plenty of actors. He played a good few real-world bad guys, tackling Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, or divisive political figures from Winston Churchill to Harry S Truman.
One thing is clear, which is that Oldman isn’t easily deterred, even by the roles that might send plenty of his peers running. Enough people wouldn’t want to go anywhere near a role as looming as the historic Count Dracula and the legacy of the literary figure, let alone take on that character in a Francis Ford Coppola flick, given the director’s reputation, but the actor was all in.
It seems to suit his own working ways as he deep dives and surrenders to every role he takes on, and with Coppola’s ways, too, being a director who demands intensity and perfection, the combination led to an overwhelming project.
He recalled making Bram Stoker’s Dracula as “Four weeks rehearsal up in Napa [Valley], what we call ‘Camp Coppola’. He cooked a lot of dinners, and we drank a lot of his wine, and we read the book out loud, which was tough. We improved and rehearsed. But that means four weeks, and then many more weeks filming, where Oldman had to embody the bad guy.
“I never had a rest, I never had a day off. It was a six-month shoot and I worked 150 hours in the old man makeup alone. That’s a lot of glue on your face. But you surrender to it, you have to find a peace with it,” he added.
However, while he’s more than used to finding peace within a villain’s mind, there is a line he won’t cross.
“I was asked to play Charles Manson. It was too much karma around that,” he said. He didn’t name the project, but the interview took place back in 2012, so it’s way too early to be Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, leaving the question open about what movie this could have been for, but either way, Oldman wouldn’t do it.
In his eyes, it’s still too soon. He turned it down “out of respect for the sister that’s still living and Polanski,” he said, considering the family of the victim, Sharon Tate, who are still alive.
Part of that decision came down to the inevitable pathos an actor has to find for a bad guy. “You play a villain, or you play a bad guy, you’ve got to find something that’s likeable,” he said, and when the Manson murders are still relatively recent in the grand scheme of things, he didn’t think it was right to be trying to find the good in the cult leader just yet.
