А я сегодня не с пустыми руками, а с интервью! Интервью нагло сперто с одного форума, посвященного Дэвиду Боуи (там, на форуме том, скажу по секрету, БОЛЬШОЙ раздел про Олдмана и вообще куча интересного) ИТАК!
Interview: Gary Oldman Exorcising with Gary Oldman Gary Oldman goes to “dark, weird places” to play a rabbi helping a woman possessed by her dead twin’s evil spirit
By Bob Strauss Not so long ago, Gary Oldman may well have wanted to play some evil supernatural spirit in The Unborn. These days, though, it’s not surprising that he preferred to play the rabbi.
Though versatile and accomplished on the stage and screen, the 50-year-old Englishman has come a long way from the days when the nicest person he played on film was named Sid Vicious. Racist skinheads, violent criminals, presidential assassins and Count Dracula himself were typical Oldman film parts from the mid-1980s until early into the 21st century. But two recurring roles begun in the middle of this decade — the nurturing and self-sacrificing Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films and Gotham City’s one honest cop, Jim Gordon, in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight — seem to have helped turn Oldman away from his fascination with the uglier aspects of both man and monster’s nature.
Not that playing The Unborn’s Rabbi Sendak was a sunny romp through fields of bright flowers.
Gary Oldman as Rabbi Sendak inThe Unborn
“I had to go to very dark, weird places for that,” Oldman admits during a Beverly Hills interview. “What’s been interesting for me lately has been going against all the other types of characters that I’ve played. So it is nice to play someone who is really the moral centre of the piece, versus some of those other, wackier, stranger people I’ve portrayed in the past.
“I mean, it’s been kind of a conscious decision just to turn the ship around a bit and do other things. But I’m still a bit uneasy about The Unborn. It’s written and directed by David Goyer, who also wrote the Batman movies. It was great working with him. He understands horror movies as well as he does comic book movies.
“But this is a dark exorcism movie. It’s a horror movie, in which I play a rabbi; I don’t know how that’s going to turn out! But I am a very, sort of, progressive rabbi. A girl thinks she’s possessed and I perform the rite.”
That girl, Casey, played by Odette Yustman, is plagued by the spirit of her twin brother who died at birth and now wants life, which may require the death of his teenaged sister. Oldman can sound as shocked and disoriented about the whole horrific scenario as he cares to. But the truth is, he’s exorcised enough real-life demons to fuel his own scary movie franchise.
You can consider 1997’s Nil by Mouth, a movie about life with a violent, alcoholic father, the first film in that franchise. Oldman — whose own dad abandoned the family when his son was seven — wrote and directed that movie and admits it’s semi-autobiographical.
Creative from an early age, young Gary managed to overcome his impoverished London upbringing and win a drama college scholarship.
“It was a pretty poor neighbourhood and I had this drive for survival in me,” he reckons. “I guess I’m quite a survivor. But I don’t know how it came about. I just wanted to get out, that’s all I knew. I thought that there was something in the world more than that, than the end of my street. I don’t know what makes people do it, you know? I used to think about stuff too much, but I’ve kind of, actually, stopped. I think I got to a point where I said, forget it, just live. Just stopped contemplating my own navel.”
After making his widely acclaimed film debut in the Vicious bio-pic Sid and Nancy, Oldman wrestled with his own substance abuse issues and burned through three marriages (the middle one to Uma Thurman).
These days, the sober father of three sees no point in going to the extremes that he used to, either personally or professionally.
“You know, as you get older, you just kind of go, I’ve lost the ambition I once had, that sort of drive and fire underneath me,” Oldman admits. “I don’t mean it negatively, I just mean that there are other things and other priorities as you get older. I want my weekends off and I want to be home for dinner and in time to put my kids to bed.”
Getting lazy in his old age? Hardly. Oldman still projects a riveting screen presence, even when he’s playing sympathetic as opposed to the old sociopathic characters. And who knows? This talk about settling down and turning into a positive-thinking bloke could just be a phase. Or an act.
Regardless, it would be nice to see Gary Oldman play some eminently crazy, scary and disturbing individual again in the future, just because he does it so well — or, as he humbly notes, he does it so professionally.
“I give the illusion I go to the wall, and that’s the trick,” Oldman explains. “I don’t. But that’s the facility. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Nothing wrong with it; that’s my job.”
Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.
JUST CALL HIM HARRY GOLDMAN The Unborn sounds a lot like The Exorcist, but with one major twist. Instead of a priest wrenching an evil spirit away from the protagonist, it’s a rabbi played by Gary Oldman. And perhaps the chance to play a rabbi had something to do with Oldman’s decision to take the role.
Last year, Oldman directed a music video for the tongue-in-cheek Jewish hip-hop group Chutzpah (think Beastie Boys meet Sacha Baron Cohen).
In an interview with JMag, Chutzpah member Master Tav explained the band’s relationship with the actor.
“Gary Oldman and I play music together,” said Tav. “He’s a very talented musician. And he has always wanted to be Jewish. Of course, he’s British, Protestant, the whole thing, but he always thought that being Jewish would be really cool, and he thinks it’s hip to be Jewish. The only thing that ever upset him was that I didn’t credit him Harry Goldman.
He has this whole story about how he just flipped a couple of the letters in his name and became Gary Oldman so he’d be a famous movie actor, but he really wants to be Harry Goldman.”