The Prisoner

Siobhan Synnot

GARY Oldman eyes up the hogshead pitcher that has been placed on the table. A prop from Hogwarts banqueting hall, it has been brought here by the film’s distributor as an atmospheric piece of set dressing for the interview. The lid is a crumbling pig’s head, shaped out of faux brass. Inside is a litre of thin, urinous liquid. He takes a speculative sniff. "In the old days," he says, replacing the lid, "I would have drunk that."

Known as a villain on screen and an alcoholic in the media, the first impression of Oldman is not far removed from the image of the roles he’s chosen. He hardly ever plays a character who is not, in their own special way, weird or overwound. But he gets a little peevish when I suggest that one of the strengths in casting him as Sirius Black, Harry Potter’s mysterious, murderous Prisoner of Azkaban is that it plays with the audience’s expectation that he will be the villain.

"Lee Harvey Oswald is not a bad guy, Dracula is not a bad guy, Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears was not a bad guy. There’s less than you think," he counters.

"Some of my best work has been in comedy but it didn’t have the right publicists and producers and distributors, so it goes to DVD and doesn’t get released. People forget Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is funny. Dracula is funny."

Well, yes and no. Certainly Oliver Stone’s JFK argues that Oswald was framed, and Dracula was urbane but he was still not to be trusted around a cut finger, and all of these films are at least 10 years old. The rest of Oldman’s CV is full of instances where he has slipped nimbly and regularly into the devil’s skin, trying to kill President Harrison Ford in Air Force One, a vicious, half-blind white Rastafarian in Tarantino’s True Romance and in his last kids film, Lost in Space, Dr Smith is not just cowardly but clearly Gone to the Bad.

Oldman may have made his name as a strikingly original actor but he rapidly became the poster boy for larger-than-life supervillain roles. Then Nil by Mouth, which he directed and wrote, drawing from his past, introduced us to his even darker side. A raw account of a family dominated by Ray Winstone’s hard-drinking patriarch with Kathy Burke as his abused wife, it was sometimes so uncompromising that it was hard to know whether to clap your hands or call for help.

Oldman cast people he grew up with, including the voice of his 76-year-old mother, and part-funded the £2.5m film. He also gave a key role to his big sister, a former truck driver, and renamed her Leila Morse. Encouraged, Morse decided to follow her baby brother into acting and is now a regular on EastEnders as Big Mo Slater, possibly the loudest of the Slater family. Does Oldman watch the show and monitor her progress?

"No," he grimaces. "But when I’m round her house I can’t avoid it. She gets all the videotapes out for me. And the DVDs."

When Kathy Burke won best actress at the Cannes Film festival, other directors instructed their directors of photography to watch Nil by Mouth and mimic some of its dirty framework. At the time, an ebullient Oldman announced that he would like to come back to Britain and make more films. But he didn’t.

"I’ve written three other scripts and tried to get one made but the industry has changed," he says now. "Two years ago I could tell a company I’ve got Russell Crowe and that would get the film made. Now they’d ask, ‘And who’s the girl?’

"Just one famous face isn’t enough any more. After Nil by Mouth the business changed. Foreign finance changed: I had relationships with the Japanese and their economy crashed. Now it’s Germany that has the money. "Filmmaking now is tied to being famous. I’ll chase a part and another actor will get it instead of me; could we both play the part, or could I play the part? What’s he got that I haven’t got? He’s more famous than me?

"The studios say, ‘We’ll give you the money if you cast this person in it.’ My feeling is - if I’m going to make a piece of shit, let it be your piece of shit."

Oldman is not keen on compromise, but this is not the arrogance of an actor whose career has gone to his head. Artistic control is clearly an issue for Oldman because he was so powerless in his formative years. From the start of his acting career he has always arrived brimming with ideas and opinions. In Sid and Nancy, he disagreed constantly with the director, refused to believe that Sid killed Nancy and demanded a different ending. When he left a project where he was to play Dylan Thomas with his then wife Uma Thurman as Caitlin Thomas, he cited "nervous exhaustion" but there were claims that the former Royal Shakespeare Company actor had loudly criticised the script.

More recently he hit out at the most powerful man in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg, for imposing a liberal ideology on his film The Contender. There are plenty of examples of young, working-class British men coming good in Hollywood - Terence Stamp, Michael Caine and of course Sir Sean Connery. Oldman shares some of their charisma and their ability to capture headlines.

His bad-boy reputation was not helped when he was stopped on Sunset Boulevard and locked up in a LA jail on charges of drunk-driving after a night out with actor Kiefer Sutherland, who had been jilted by Julia Roberts just before their marriage. The actor later admitted to a long battle with heavy drinking and eventually checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation centre.

There are few signs of dissipation about the 46-year-old Oldman these days. Clear eyed, with a smart executive suit and a softly spiked hairstyle, he looks like a well-preserved businessman, a pair of small square glasses emphasising his beaky features. Only later does it transpire that he has been working to the point of exhaustion. A messy divorce from his third wife, Donya Fiorentino, was only resolved last month, with Oldman gaining custody of both his young sons. He hasn’t had a prominent film in cinemas since Hannibal a few years ago, and even then he asked to have his name removed from the credits.

Now he has been lining up films like buses. Besides Harry Potter, he has made a film with Robert Carlyle called Dead Fish where a hit man and a neurotic accidentally swap mobile phones. And last month he was working on Batman Begins, the hugely-hyped franchise prequel with Oldman playing a young version of police Commissioner Gordon who joins forces with Christian Bale’s caped crusader.

And, of course, he will be back again as Sirius Black in the next film, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. Oldman doesn’t read many books, he says, but the role has made him a superstar in the eyes of Alfie, his son from his first marriage and his younger boys take his articulated action figure to school with them for "show and tell".

"My kids don’t get to see a lot of my films but with Harry Potter I got enormous respect. There are two big books in our age; one’s the Bible and the other is Harry Potter. When I was a kid I watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and now my kids do the same. Sirius means I get to be imprinted on generations in the same way.

"Mind you I haven’t read the fifth Harry Potter book yet, but someone let the ending slip the other day so I know what happens next. It’s not good news, is it?"

With thanks to: Scotsman.com