How Tim Burton’s ‘Planet of the Apes’ helped Gary Oldman to win an Oscar
In 2001, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes “reimagining” arrived in cinemas. Although it performed well at the box office, the project was widely panned by critics, leading Fox to abandon plans for a sequel. One universally lauded element, however, was Rick Baker’s extraordinary prosthetic makeup, which transformed actors like Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter into disturbingly humanlike apes. Some 17 years later, Gary Oldman won the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, in part owing an odd debt to Planet of the Apes, a film in which he never even appeared.
When Burton was casting his Apes movie in the early 2000s, he knew exactly who he wanted to play the villainous General Thade. He got his man, too, casting Oldman in the part. However, Oldman dropped out of the role because he wasn’t happy with his pay packet, and Roth stepped into the vacancy. Interestingly, though, it wouldn’t be Oldman’s final encounter with the franchise. After it was successfully rebooted in 2011 with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Oldman starred in the sequel to that film, the acclaimed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Fascinatingly, before he departed Burton’s production, Oldman met the famed member of Baker’s team tasked with turning him into Thade. He was so impressed with prosthetics genius Kazuhiro Tsuji’s work that, when he signed on to play Churchill in Darkest Hour and didn’t want to put on weight to more perfectly resemble the iconic wartime figure, his mind flashed back to the talented young man he met all those years ago. There was one problem, though: Tsuji had retired from filmmaking.
You see, after pulling out all the stops to create prosthetics which convincingly made Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis in 2012’s Looper, Tsuji called it a day with Hollywood. He wanted to devote himself to sculpture and began making stunningly detailed busts of famous figures like Frida Kahlo and Abraham Lincoln.
Imagine Tsuji’s surprise, then, when Oldman turned up at his LA studio in person and begged him to come out of retirement to transform him into Churchill. Oldman was envisioning a fat suit and facial prosthetics, and he didn’t want any other artist to work on him—only Tsuji. The shocked artist told The Hollywood Reporter, “He said that if I didn’t, he wouldn’t play the part”.
Oldman must have been extremely persuasive because Tsuji agreed to get back in the game. In the summer of 2016, he set about applying foam, silicone, and spandex to Oldman’s face and body, hoping that Churchill would emerge. Instead, as Oldman joked, “It was like Gary Oldman and Winston Churchill had a love child. And it wasn’t pretty.”
Tsuji is a master of his craft, so he soon came up with a body suit weighing 14 pounds and a frighteningly realistic silicone face mask. Amazingly, the prosthetics were so lifelike that when a World War II expert hired by the production caught a glimpse of photos on the wall of Oldman as Churchill, he supposedly said, “These look very interesting. Where did you find them?” Kristen Scott-Thomas, who played Churchill’s wife, Clementine, was stunned that the makeup had fooled a historian. She exclaimed, “It’s not Winston; it’s our Gary!”
Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel added, “I was searching for Gary Oldman, but the only place I could see him was in the eyes.”
Ultimately, it all begs an intriguing question. Would Oldman’s fierce performance as Churchill have landed him that coveted Academy Award if he hadn’t convinced Tsuji to return to the movie business? It’s impossible to say. But one thing is certain – Tsuji’s stunning work gave Oldman the perfect platform upon which to build something historic.
