Like most Brits of a certain age, Gary Oldman grew up learning about Winston Churchill.
“When I was growing up, and the syllabus was very much that history was the great wars, World War I and World War II, he was and is the hero, the man who saved us from tyranny,” the actor said in a phone interview. “Although it obviously took more than one man, to us he’s the guy that won the war. He’s very much our savior.”
Oldman said he has “always been fascinated by him, but I never thought I would play him, only because of the physicality.”
Churchill was 5 feet 6 inches tall and resembled, in girth and demeanor, a jowly bulldog. Oldman, at 5 feet 9 inches tall, is lean and a bit gangly — as anyone knows who saw him in his starmaking role as punk rocker Sid Vicious in “Sid and Nancy” (1986) or as Commissioner Gordon in the “Dark Knight” trilogy or the fugitive Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” films.
“It wasn’t really something that I was chasing,” Oldman said. It was Eric Fellner, the co-chairman of the English production company Working Title Films, who was determined to make a movie about Churchill, and Oldman at first said no. “It’s like a dog with a bone — he wouldn’t let go,” Oldman said.
The result is “Darkest Hour,” a dynamic profile of Churchill’s early weeks as prime minister, at the beginning of World War II, that is rolling out across the country. (It opens Friday, Dec. 22, in Salt Lake City.) The movie already has earned Oldman a Golden Globe nomination and made him a favorite for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
At Fellner’s urging, Oldman started studying Churchill, reading and listening to his speeches and consulting with a Churchill scholar. But, still, “the roadblock to it [was] the physicality,” he said. Only when Oldman approached a retired makeup artist, Kazuhiro Tsuji — whose work turned Jim Carrey into The Grinch, Ron Perlman into Hellboy and Brad Pitt into Benjamin Button — and “seduced him out of retirement. … It was partly contingent on Kazu being able to do the makeup that tipped it for me.”
Oldman spent a year researching Churchill, “soaking it up like a sponge,” he said. “Actually, [it was] to the point where my wife said, ‘I go to bed with Winston Churchill, but I wake up with Gary.’ It was just immersing myself into the world and hoping that, by osmosis, it would happen. I think it’s like most parts, in that respect. There’s always that period of thinking, ‘What the hell have I gotten myself into?’”
Oldman joins a long list of actors, most of them Brits, who have played Churchill. He fondly recalled Robert Hardy, who played Churchill frequently (particularly in two 1980s miniseries), and Albert Finney, who portrayed him in a 2002 TV movie.
“The thing about Winston Churchill is, someone on the street, you would say ‘Winston Churchill,’ and they’ve all got an idea of who he is,” Oldman said. “I don’t know how much of that is contaminated by their memory. Are they remembering Churchill, or are they remembering Albert Finney as Churchill?”
Studying the newsreels of Churchill, Oldman said, “he was a man who was always marching. He was always ahead of everybody else. He was sort of skipping around. He was energized, cherubic, and had a sort of smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye.” That runs counter to the public image of a “man [who] was born in a bad mood, a curmudgeon, a grumpy old man with a cigar and a drink in his hand,” he said.
This image released by Focus Features shows Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in a scene from "Darkest Hour." (Jack English/Focus Features via AP)
In “Darkest Hour,” director Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Pride & Prejudice”) and screenwriter Anthony McCarten focused entirely on a brief period in Churchill’s life: the weeks in May and June 1940, as Churchill ascends to prime minister and fends off politicians on his own side wanting to make a peace deal with Hitler in the days leading to the Allied retreat at Dunkirk.
McCarten had a book about oratory, Oldman said, that said “there are three or four speeches that were considered some of the greatest speeches in the English language, and realized that they were all written in a very small space of time. He then looked into and researched why that would have been, what would have motivated such rhetoric in a very concentrated period? … It wasn’t a life, it wasn’t a whole life. It was a window, a snapshot of a very, very specific moment in time, when it would have all gone very pear-shaped.”
As it happens, “Darkest Hour” is the third movie this year to depict Dunkirk, after Christopher Nolan’s war drama “Dunkirk” and Lone Scherfig’s wartime comedy/romance “Their Finest.” But Oldman doesn’t feel his movie is in competition with them to tell the story.
“If anyone here is the winner, I think it’s history is the winner,” he said. “It is an absolutely thrilling piece of history that I think people have forgotten. It just became a name, Dunkirk.”
“Darkest Hour,” Oldman said, “is certainly a film about leadership, and above all about statesmanship. … I think every generation looks for great leadership in the world. Anywhere. It’s a universal thing. We didn’t set out to make anything topical or relevant. … If it connects and it resonates, than it’s a good thing.”
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