“He said that if I didn’t, he wouldn’t play the part,” says Tsuji. Oldman personally visited the artist’s studio in L.A. Just the man for the job, Oldman decided - except Tsuji had retired from film in 2012, at the ripe age of 43, four years after creating his masterpiece (reverse-aging Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and had been devoting himself to sculpture. Then the actor remembered having met famed prosthetics artist Kazuhiro Tsuji some 15 years earlier, when Oldman was briefly attached to Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake. Gaining that much weight for the role was out of the question Oldman didn’t want to risk his health. Never in the history of cinema have so many statues been almost awarded to so few.īut there remained one giant problem: how to give Oldman Churchillian girth. ![]() Along with Oldman (a nominee for 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), there’s Working Title producer Eric Fellner (a five-time nominee whose first film, 1986’s Sid and Nancy, launched Oldman’s career), screenwriter Anthony McCarten (a nominee for 2015’s The Theory of Everything) and Joe Wright (who made 2007’s Atonement, which earned seven nominations although somehow missed getting one for best director). But never before has he been brought to the screen by such a pedigreed team of filmmakers, with virtually everyone involved in the project having at one point been nominated for an Oscar. Of course, Churchill has been depicted on film and TV before - most recently by John Lithgow in Netflix’s The Crown but also by Albert Finney, Brendan Gleeson, Bob Hoskins, Rod Taylor and even Christian Slater (see 2004’s Churchill: The Hollywood Years). ![]() Oldman, wearing what may be the most masterful fat suit and prosthetic chubby face ever created for the movies, plays Churchill in Darkest Hour, which opened in select theaters Nov. “How the hell was I going to do that?” asks the slender 59-year-old actor of playing such a larger-than-life figure. There was the time in 2014, for instance, when his longtime manager and producing partner, Douglas Urbanski, pitched him his own homegrown idea for a movie about the portly, cigar-chomping U.K. ![]() Gary Oldman had been asked to play Winston Churchill before.
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