“They got really pissed off”: when an overzealous producer ruined Gary Oldman’s big Hannibal surprise
It’s a widely-accepted fact of cinema that almost any movie can be instantly elevated by the presence of Gary Oldman, with the actor one of his generation’s finest talents who can always be relied upon to deliver a performance of quality regardless of what he’s starring in.
Scenery-chewing villains in blockbuster action movies, wisened mentor figures in fantasy epics, and exposition machines in comic book adaptations are three of the most thankless roles genre fare has to offer in their most archetypal form. But in Oldman’s hands, he was able to make it memorable.
From hamming it up opposite Harrison Ford in Air Force One to acting as Batman’s closest ally in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy via a stint as Harry Potter‘s Sirius Black that he thinks he could have done better, Oldman in a supporting part is much better than no Oldman at all.
The Academy Award winner was even planning to slink into a high-profile sequel completely unnoticed, only for the movie’s overzealous producer to spoil the big surprise. Had his involvement not been leaked beforehand by the person overseeing the production, then it would have been a genuine surprise to discover the chameleonic star had quite literally become unrecognisable and disappeared into his role.
When the pieces started falling into place for Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, Christopher Reeve was the first choice to play wheelchair-bound antagonist Mason Verger. When he didn’t commit, Oldman was drafted in and requested that his name go unmentioned, and he goes unbilled and uncredited to maintain the mystique of a character buried under mountains of prosthetics.
Not exactly the shy and retiring type, Dino De Laurentiis decided to completely disavow Oldman’s pleas and tell the entire world at a press conference that he was playing Verger. As the producer’s wife Martha explained to The Guardian, from that point on, “we couldn’t deny that he was in the movie,” which left the actor’s camp rather irritated.
“They got really pissed off,” she admitted of the snafu caused by De Laurentiis’ excitement at snagging Oldman for a plum part in Hannibal. This would have been along similar lines to Kevin Spacey being omitted from all of Seven‘s marketing and promotional materials until he popped up halfway through as serial killer John Doe, except audience members may not have been able to pick him out at all given the makeup.
Oldman wanted to do it anonymously partly for “a bit of fun” but also because the cinema world had come to know him “unofficially the man of many faces”. Hannibal did at least obscure his visage to render him as un-Oldman-like as possible, but he’d have much preferred it were his name to be kept shrouded in mystery until the film had been released.
