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Gary Oldman says breaking away from the bad-guy personas in film took hard work
LOS ANGELES -- Even the most heinous villains can be reformed. But can the actors who play them? It's an apt question for Gary Oldman, once Hollywood's go-to guy for psychos and assassins, but now an ally and father figure to the righteous likes of Batman and Harry Potter. "I just got into this thing of (playing) the bad guy," says the 50-year-old Brit at a Beverly Hills hotel. "You come onto the scene and it's in Sid and Nancy. You're unknown and no one really knows who you are. Up to that point I had had a career in the theatre and I'd been in comedies and musicals, all sorts of thing -- and then you do that sort of performance (as Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious) and slowly your career narrows and narrows and narrows." Yet if his choices became increasingly limited, they were at least lucrative. Following Sid and Nancy in 1981, Oldman spent more thean a decade delivering memorably malevolent turns in such hits as Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), True Romance (1993), The Professional (1994), The Fifth Element (1997) and Air Force One (1997). Now, though, he is perhaps best recognized by the new generation for the kind, stalwart wisdom he has brought to two of Hollywood's biggest franchises: As decent cop Jim Gordon in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and as Sirius Black, mentor and godfather to J.K. Rowling's boy wizard Harry Potter.
Breaking from bad guys was a struggle, he recalls -- not because of a desire to do so but because filmmakers refused to see him as anything else. "I've played bad guys because I've worked for people with less imagination than (Batman director) Chris Nolan," he says. Which isn't to suggest you can't detect a twinge of envy in Oldman's voice as he describes time spent watching the late Heath Ledger cut loose as the diabolical Joker, the sort of raving lunatic Oldman himself might have once played. (Indeed, one of Ledger's influences was Sid Vicious.) "You have to sort of get out of your way when you play a good guy -- you can't do too much," Oldman says. "Gordon is the vase, and the Joker and Batman are the flowers ... You want to do stuff, (but you must) service what's there on the page. You know Heath can take those lines and he's got the freedom in the role to just take it places, and I think it reflects in the way that it's shot. There's immediacy and a danger in the scenes with Heath because Chris has just said, 'You know what, put it on a Steadicam, put it on handheld, and let's just see what this kid does. Let's see what he's going to do as the Joker.' There's a freedom there and you don't have that with Gordon. You're more reigned in, which I think it's equally challenging. But you can understand why actors like all the villains and the bad guys." Off-screen, Oldman has mellowed as well, raising three sons from two previous marriages. It's a far cry from the debauched hard-driving lifestyle he was once known for. "I'm getting more square," he says of fatherhood and family life. "I find myself saying things that my parents said." Such as? "Um, what's the big one I keep telling them? I always say, 'A lazy man works twice as hard, so you've got to do a job right the first time. Take your time and take the time it takes. Put the energy, the effort and the focus into it, otherwise you just end up doing it again' ... You just become more and more old-fashioned: 'Clean that up, do that -- you know, don't argue. Bring your plate to the thing.' ... I always say to them, 'Hate me now, love me later.' You're civilizing them. "That's what you're doing ... And if you don't they'll come to you when they're all messed up and 22 years old and go, 'Where the *!$% were you? Why didn't you help me?' "
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