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Probably the likeliest Oscar winner in 2018 is Gary Oldman, 59, for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. The title refers to a black period in 1940, when Hitler was winning World War II and Churchill defied the British establishment, whose eminent members thought the only and obvious smart move was to surrender. The film boasts a parade of top actors and a brilliant acting duel between Oldman and Australian star Ben Mendelsohn, 48, as Churchill's opponent-turned-ally King George VI (the role Colin Firth made famous in The King's Speech). Director Joe Wright says that Oldman and Mendelsohn remind him of two prizefighters vying for a title. But Oldman very nearly ran away from his own rendezvous with destiny in the role of a lifetime, as he said at a Washington, D.C., screening of the film and in an AARP interview.
Why did you hesitate to accept the role of Churchill? Was it partly all the famous people who played him before?
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I turned it down. You're stepping into Richard Hardy's shoes, Albert Finney's shoes, Michael Gambon's. And, of course, the silhouette. You look at me, and I probably could have a good crack at Stan Laurel.
Or other skinny, intense guys you've played to acclaim: Sid Vicious, Lee Harvey Oswald, Joe Orton, Dracula, and indelible characters in films that were blockbusters, Harry Potter and The Dark Knight. But 3 1/2 hours of makeup a day and a state-of-the-art fat suit by Oscar-magnet designer Kazuhiro Tsuji (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) make you look the big part you refused to do for so long.
Every time my manager brought it up, I'd say, "I don't want to hear about it — my decision is final!"
What changed your mind?
It was what I call the surrender to Winston, which was almost a year of work.
How did you avoid having your performance contaminated by prior Winstons?
What I did was to push all of that aside and go to the source material, the [1940] newsreel footage. He’s often thought of as this grumpy curmudgeon born in a bad mood, with a whiskey and a cigar, and he shuffles in. And what I saw, what jumped out of this old, jittery black-and-white footage, was a man who was 65 but moved like a 20-year-old. He moved through space with a fixity of purpose. He had this cherubic face with sort of a naughty schoolboy grin, with a sparkle in his eye.
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