Even being dressed up as Winston Churchill couldn’t stop Gary Oldman from getting down to some James Brown. I can’t imagine it was too comfortable trying to move like that in the suit he had to wear but he was making it look good at least, or as good as he could. The suit of course is the one he’s wearing for The Darkest Hour, the movie that has been getting a lot of buzz since he’s gone over the top in recreating the look and feel of Winston Churchill and has done what many have called a fine job at it.
The reason why Oldman is wearing the suit is that Churchill was a heavier man and unlike Robert De Niro back in the day Gary isn’t going to start gaining weight and wreck his health. The number of cigars he had to smoke for the movie might have already done that in a big way. If you didn’t know already the cigar budget for the film was in the tens of thousands of dollars since they didn’t use anything cheap or fake, they used real cigars that Gary had to smoke to keep the illusion of the character. The downside of this is that he had to smoke so much that he eventually came close to getting nicotine poisoning at one point. Gary was heard to say that he felt like he was going green beneath his suit since when one cigar was about out they would light another one and hand it to him.
It would seem that he went to great extremes to complete this part but that also seems to be Oldman’s M.O. on a great many movies, at least for his acting if not for his dedication to looking the part. This is one of the only times that I can recall that he’s altered his looks in such a way despite the fact that he’s wearing a suit. I get the feeling I’m forgetting a film or two that he starred in that he was hard to recognize, besides Hannibal, but really, even that time seems like it pales in comparison to this. I do kind of wonder just what prompted the sudden dancing scene but I suppose any time seems like a good time to dance.
Oldman is one of those great actors that kind of comes and goes in films. He takes on interesting parts and then fades away for a while to do stuff that people don’t necessarily watch but will hear about from time to time. He’s good at just about anything he does but there are those movies that you have to wonder why he signed on. The Book of Eli was a decent movie but his character, Carnegie, seemed a little stretched, as though he wasn’t really all that important to the story. Thankfully the role of Winston Churchill isn’t an easy one to forget since the man was a big part of history and made sure that his legacy would stick.
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