Gary Oldman on Becoming Churchill: Finding the Man Behind the Statue

Four hours in make-up were only the beginning. In Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman wanted to find the vulnerable human being beneath the monument to Winston Churchill.

Since his breakthrough as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy in 1986, Gary Oldman has astonished critics and filmmakers with his ability to disappear into a character. His transformations have made him one of cinema’s most admired actors. Yet, before Darkest Hour, he had received only one Oscar nomination, for playing George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

He began on the London stage, at a time when he regarded film as an inferior art to theatre. The success of Sid and Nancy, followed by other British independent films, attracted Hollywood’s attention. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s and built a career playing people whose appearances, voices and temperaments seemed to have little in common.

There was Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK, the corrupt detective in Léon, Beethoven, Dracula and the playwright Joe Orton. Later came more reassuring figures: Commissioner Gordon in the Dark Knight films and Sirius Black in Harry Potter. Whether the character was good, evil or somewhere in between, the fascination lay in watching Oldman become somebody else.

The description “the best actor without an Oscar” has followed him for years. His portrayal of Winston Churchill may finally change that. But when we speak about Darkest Hour, it is the work behind the performance, rather than the prospect of a trophy, that occupies him.

Finding the man behind the statue

Joe Wright’s film concentrates on Churchill’s first weeks as prime minister in 1940, when Britain faces the possibility of defeat and invasion. Allied troops are trapped at Dunkirk. Within the government, the argument over whether to negotiate with Hitler threatens Churchill’s leadership almost as soon as it begins.

Instead of presenting an untouchable national icon, the film finds a man under pressure: stubborn, frightened, physically imperfect and capable of mistakes. Oldman tells me that he wanted to play a human being before he played a leader.

“You are trying to find the man behind the statue on the plinth,” he explains. “You look at him as a genius, but a flawed genius. There is no question that he made mistakes. He certainly wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and that was the challenge for me.”

Physical transformation has long been part of Oldman’s method. For Churchill, however, there was almost no natural resemblance to build upon. He made the involvement of make-up artist Kazuhiro Tsuji a condition of accepting the role, then spent months helping to develop the appearance before filming began.

Every shooting day required approximately four hours in the make-up chair. Oldman also read Churchill’s books, watched documentary footage and visited places associated with his life, including Blenheim Palace and Chartwell. The research supplied facts, but it also challenged the familiar image of a ponderous old man.

“In the photographs and footage of the period, you notice that he was active,” he says. “He wasn’t this old man lumbering around. I saw energy and a sparkle, and there was also a softness and sensitivity in the face.”

Eighteen-hour days inside Churchill’s skin

Some discoveries came through research; others emerged only from the strain of performing. Oldman appears in almost every scene. His day began hours before the rest of the crew arrived and continued after filming, when the make-up had to be removed.

“The thing that occupied my mind was stamina,” he says. “I would arrive four hours before the crew, work all day, then spend an hour taking the make-up off. By the time you have relaxed, showered and eaten, you have had an eighteen- or twenty-hour day. I did that for forty-eight days.”

The experience gave him a different way of thinking about the demands on Churchill. Oldman does not share his character’s habits of drinking and smoking, yet even the controlled circumstances of a film production tested his endurance. He began to imagine the burden of simultaneously managing military catastrophe, opposition within the government and the ordinary business of running a country.

“Here was a man fighting his own government, writing three of the greatest political speeches in the English language in four weeks, dealing with Dunkirk and the evacuation, and facing the possible invasion of Britain by Hitler,” he says. “He was also dealing with domestic politics. He couldn’t just leave everything else and concentrate on one thing. The war was one part of what he was doing.”

Put all of that together, he says, and his admiration for Churchill’s capacity to endure increased enormously.

Feeling a character instead of imitating him

Oldman’s preparation does not stop at intellectual understanding. Knowing a person’s biography is not the same as finding that person’s emotional and physical life. He describes a process in which listening, movement, sensation and make-up gradually become inseparable.

Churchill’s voice was the starting point. Oldman listened to the speeches, paying attention to the slight speech impediment, the weight of the words and the sound that could at first seem nasal. Then he studied what the mouth and lips were doing to produce it.

“You are trying to capture that physical and emotional feeling in the mouth and in the voice,” he says. “That is what I mean when I talk about feeling the character. Reading a book doesn’t give you that. You have to work and find it through feeling.”

The aim is to move beyond an impersonation assembled from recognisable mannerisms. A performance has to become something experienced from within. The make-up can help, but it also changes the balance of what the actor needs to do.

“First you concentrate on the person, on the emotions and the feeling in and around the mouth. Then, when you put on the make-up, you realise that it is helping you. You reduce what you are doing with the lips and begin to adapt to it.”

Some of that work is deliberate and carefully prepared. Some, he says, arrives as the magic an actor hopes will happen. The preparation creates the conditions; it cannot entirely explain the result.

With Darkest Hour, that magic appears to have happened again. Oldman has already won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award, alongside recognition from critics. He is now an Oscar nominee and one of the favourites to win. Whatever happens on the night, his Churchill demonstrates why the transformation has attracted such attention: beneath the famous face, he has found a man.