Shy spy

Gary Oldman talks about his muted turn in British espionage thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Syndicate Britain has a new cohort of stellar young actors, and Gary Oldman rattles off their names without hesitation: Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy...

“I always think it’s exciting to see these people come up,” Oldman says. “It’s the lineage. It’s like we’re links in a chain.”

Oldman himself exploded onto the scene 25 years ago, hailed almost immediately as a daring, even dangerous actor. He delivered incendiary, occasionally over-the-top performances in Sid and Nancy (1986), Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and JFK (1991), not to mention Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), Leon: The Professional (1994) and The Fifth Element (1997).

At 53, however, the onetime wild young man has come to terms with maturity, having played the fatherly wizard/escaped convict Sirius Black in four Harry Potter films and the rumpled, reflexively honourable Detective Jim Gordon in a trio of Batman adventures. His latest movie, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, casts him as John le Carre’s mild-mannered-but-brilliant, emphatically middle-aged spymaster George Smiley, previously played by Alec Guinness in a much-praised 1979 miniseries based on the same book.

“It’s just the evolution of a life and career,” Oldman says as he settles onto a couch in a suite at a Manhattan hotel. “You wonder where it all went, the time, everything. We all do. Fifty now doesn’t feel old, doesn’t seem as old as it once did. Fifty, to me, is a kid, especially in the generation in which Tinker Tailor is set. Alec Guinness was nearly 70 when he played Smiley in the miniseries. He was probably too old.

“But I remember, 50, to me, seemed ancient,” he continues. “It doesn’t anymore. I feel I’m of the generation with these guys, Tom and Benedict, except I’m playing their father or boss. I feel I’m a young 53, but there is 20 years’ difference. So when Michael Fassbender comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, man, you’re one of the reasons why I’m here, why I want to do this,’ it brings it home to you. Tom Hardy said, ‘Listen, I’ve stolen it all from you. I remember seeing you when I was a kid. Now I’m working with you.’

“It’s a compliment,” Oldman says with a shrug, “but I’m getting on a bit. It’s true, though, that (director) Tomas Alfredson wanted to cast Tinker Tailor younger across the board. Even when it came in, my initial thought was, ‘I’m not old enough to play Smiley. Am I too young? No, not really.’”

DIGGING FOR CLUES

Out now in the UAE, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is based on le Carre’s 1974 novel of the same name. Set in the early 1970s, it follows Smiley, a retired Secret Intelligence Service spy who is called back to active duty to ferret out a mole within MI6, aka ‘The Circus’. In addition to Oldman, the top-notch cast includes Colin Firth, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong and the aforementioned Cumberbatch and Hardy.

Smiley is a man of integrity, loyal, civilised and almost always calm – not, in short, the kind of guy that Oldman made his name playing. He acknowledges that it was a challenge to make so sedate a figure into a compelling movie lead.

“He’s an unusual character in that sense,” Oldman says, “because he motors the story and he’s at the centre of the piece. So he drives it, but yet he’s driving it from a very restrained, passive place. It’s a hard one. It’s a hard one because you get the clues and you build a character, but it’s the script, the material that determines the tone that you play him.

“You know the old saying, ‘If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage,’” he says. “That is so true. A script, to me, is your map of the world, and sometimes you have to work very hard. I worked very hard on this character.”

Smiley’s calm is ruffled only twice in the entire movie, once when he pulls out a gun and again when he raises his voice – but doesn’t quite yell – during a tense conversation with Haydon (Firth), a high-ranking player within The Circus.

“Those are major moments,” Oldman says. “There was a scene in the book where George is in the dark and he’s rigged up a piece of wire or string to help him stumble around. Tomas didn’t want that. He didn’t want George to appear, suddenly, at the end of the story, as this fumbling old fool. George was once in the field, and he’s fired a gun and he’s shot people. So we wanted to give a sense of that.

“I love the fact that I take the gun out of almost a little sandwich bag,” he adds. “It’s enough to let you know that he doesn’t use the gun often, but that he’s not a stranger around a firearm.

“Where I raise my voice... he’s so disgusted with Haydon that it’s the one moment he loses his temper,” the actor continues. “Even though I don’t raise my voice very loud at all, it’s a real shout in the context of what you’ve heard.

“We shot that in an abandoned barracks, and there were all these buildings that we could convert to what we needed. It was almost like a back lot, where we could make these rooms into sets.

“We were in this little officer’s mess and it was abandoned and slightly echoey,” Oldman recalls, “and I remember that the crew and everybody all looked up when I raised my voice. Everyone was like, ‘What the hell was that?’

“It was quite a shock, because it was the only time I’d raised my voice on the set, but it just felt right.”

MOVIES AND MUSIC

Smiley figures in many of le Carre’s novels, either as the protagonist or as a supporting character. Alfredson has said that he hopes to shoot at least one more Smiley film, and Oldman says that he’s ready to slip back into the character’s trench coat and dark-rimmed glasses.

“I’ve got to get Karla,” Oldman says, referring to the elusive Soviet intelligence chief who also figures in many of those stories. “I got a sense that even in the monologue, in the story that I tell Guillam (Cumberbatch), it’s almost like George is working out something for himself. He’s really realising what he’s known for a while. I think, in that scene, he feels responsible for Karla, that he’s almost created him.

“In a way it’s a bit like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, where we’d had them in the crosshairs,” the actor says. “So he is the ghost, Karla, and George has a great deal of respect for him. He feels that he’s created him and let him go, and he’s the only one he couldn’t crack, that is still out there.”

In addition to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the ever-busy Oldman has completed several other films that will be released in 2012.

He returns as Jim Gordon, whom he describes as “Batman’s conscience”, in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.

He also portrays a “not-very-good” Elvis impersonator in the thriller Guns, Girls and Gambling and makes a “blink-and-you-miss-me” cameo in Wettest Country, a crime drama starring Jessica Chastain, Hardy and Shia LaBeouf.

Acting isn’t his only mode of expression, either. Oldman picks a mean guitar and recently took up the ukulele, and he’s frankly unsure what he’d do if ever he had the chance to play professionally – at the expense of his acting career.

“If I couldn’t do both?” he says, wrestling with the notion. “If I could make the same amount of money at both? I’d probably have to say music. I just think it’s the greatest art form. The sensation of music, the immediacy of it. I envy the great lyricists who can encapsulate life, capture a story in three or four minutes. It takes an army of people to do what I do, but you hear a song sometimes and you go, ‘Oh God, it took me two hours to say that same thing.’

“It’s the immediacy of it,” he says. “I hear a song and it just gives me a certain feeling. Great acting can also take you there, any of the arts can, but there’s something about music. It’s ethereal. You can hear it in your head.

“Of course the grass is always greener,” Oldman adds. “I know Eric Clapton and I know Seal, and it can be brutal. It’s another tour, another gig, another hotel room, and that can become a job and hard work. It has that down side to it, but I think music is very special.

“I admire musicians very much.”