Two years ago, Gary Oldman found himself in Yorkshire for the wedding of his oldest son, Alfie. As Oldman’s other sons, Gulliver and Charlie, were there too, along with his wife, Gisele Schmidt, and his stepson, William, Oldman thought it’d be a lark to make the hourlong drive through the countryside to the York Theatre Royal, where he began his acting career in 1979.
The boys were intrigued, as they had heard stories over the years. Before Oldman burst on the film scene in the 1980s playing punk rocker Sid Vicious in “Sid & Nancy” and British playwright Joe Orton in Stephen Frears’ “Prick Up Your Ears,” he had turned heads in a run of plays throughout England. Then he was, as he puts it, “kidnapped by cinema.” Wanting to see their father’s career origin story, the family piled into a couple of cars and headed out.
“It was a lovely kind of homecoming, a debt paid, really,” Oldman tells me in a Zoom conversation from London. We’ve talked a great many times over the years, and while I wouldn’t call him nostalgic, Oldman most definitely is a sentimental man, especially when it comes to family.
That day, walking around the York Theatre Royal, thinking he needed to pinch himself because, really, how could it be 45 years since he first took that stage (“It all feels last week,” he thought), Oldman met Paul Crewes, the theater’s chief executive. “Do you think you might want to ever return to the stage,” Crewes asked Oldman, “and if so, where might that be?” Oldman thought for a moment and replied: “I think I’m standing on it.”
Sure enough, last year, in between filming seasons of his acclaimed Apple TV spy series “Slow Horses,” Oldman starred in Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” playing a 69-year-old man who sits alone and listens to the recorded memories of his younger self. Everyone was so happy with it that Oldman was asked to reprise the role at London’s Royal Court Theatre this May, which is why he stayed in England after wrapping the seventh season of “Slow Horses.”
Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb in “Slow Horses.”
(Jack English / Apple TV)
“It all fell into place,” Oldman says of his return to the theater, “and once we started, I was really champing at the bit to have the first preview. I was that wound-up. And it was a very nice thing for the family to come and see their papa up there onstage. It all feels quite harmonic.”
Having just celebrated his 68th birthday, Oldman is only a year removed from Krapp, though unlike Beckett’s character he isn’t disillusioned or lonely.
“I don’t know if I’ve worked out who I am, but I feel a little easier in my skin and happier than I’ve ever been,” he says. He attributes much of that bliss to his marriage to Schmidt, an art curator, writer and photographer whom he wed in 2017. “At this point in my life, I’m with someone who gets me and understands what I do. You have to incubate, and Gisele doesn’t take it personally. It’s a big part of who I am, the quiet and isolation needed to work on a character. I’m very lucky to have found someone.”
Musing about couples who have been together for decades, Oldman brings up Kevin Bacon and his long marriage to Kyra Sedgwick. “That’s a fantastic love story,” he marvels.
Everyone’s journey is different, I offer. For Oldman, sober since 1997 and married five times (“Maybe I’m a romantic or an optimist or just ‘never say never,’” he once told me), he found his own love story. And the feeling appears mutual.
“I might be the fifth one, but I am the one,” Schmidt says playfully off-camera. Oldman smiles and repeats it in case I didn’t hear her. “It’s a lovely thing,” he adds.
Oldman feels the same way about “Slow Horses,” which has broken through at the Emmys the last two years, winning awards for writing and directing. Its fifth season aired in the fall. Two more seasons are in the can. And as author Mick Herron continues to write new books in the Slough House series, there’s no immediate end in sight.
“I mean, if I go to Book 10, 11 or 12, I’ll have to be in a walker,” Oldman jokes. “They’ll have to get a stair lift.”
He’s still sporting the facial scruff we associate with “Slow Horses’” unkempt master spy, Jackson Lamb, and as he noted last year at a SAG-AFTRA Foundation event I moderated, he still carries a few extra pounds around the midsection, the consequence of having to portray Lamb’s greasy, takeaway-container diet onscreen.
“I hadn’t seen Gary — I’d seen him on the telly — and it happened that we were filming around the same time, and I went into the makeup trailer and I [said], ‘Bloody hell!’” jokes Oldman’s “Slow Horses” co-star, Jonathan Pryce. “I thought he had a fat suit on. I didn’t realize his dedication to his craft.”
“You have to realize it’s five seasons, and it’s murderous,” Oldman answers. “It’s French fries and hot dogs and hamburgers and ice cream. It’s disgusting, isn’t it?”
The menu hasn’t changed, and neither has Lamb, still cynical and lazy, but also brilliant when he puts his mind to it, abrasive and cruel to his team, but also loyal and protective of the “losers” in his charge. Yes, outwardly, Lamb is, as Herron writes, a “sentient grease stain,” but Oldman believes he possesses a “strong moral and ethical compass.”
Over the years, Oldman has compiled what he calls a “small bible,” a journal of things that he believes may have happened to Lamb that aren’t found in Herron’s books. In fact, the most memorable scene in Season 5, where Lamb recalls a harrowing story of one of his “joes” being tortured by the East German secret police, alongside a pregnant woman, wasn’t in the book. Lamb later insists he made the whole thing up, though we learn at least some of what he said was true in the season finale.
“When you do something like that, I have to decide whether it’s true or false and then just play the scene with enough sincerity,” Oldman says. “Remember, Lamb’s a spy and a very good liar. The thing that struck me about it came at the very end. He says, ‘Well, they never got any information out of him. They wanted a name. But he never knew the f— name.’ That always struck me as an honest declamation.”
Gary Oldman.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Oldman loves returning to “Slow Horses” every year and says that as long as Apple is willing to “keep writing those checks, I’m not ready to hang up my dirty raincoat just yet.”
“Most people I meet, including one of the royals, ask me, ‘Are you going to be doing more?’” he says. “They can’t get enough of it.”
One of the royals?
Oldman pauses. “Her majesty Queen Camilla is a keen viewer.”
How do you know this?
Another pause. “She … told me,” Oldman offers. “Long story for another time, perhaps.” Schmidt then fills in the blanks. They met the queen two years ago when Oldman performed at a Shakespeare celebration for the Queen’s Reading Room charity.
So perhaps there will be a Season 8, though with two unaired seasons still to come later this year and next, asking for more feels greedy. In the meantime, there are grandchildren to dote on. Last week, Oldman and Schmidt spent the day with their 18-month-old granddaughter, Ottilie.
“I do miss the baby stage, their character developing,” Oldman says. “Ottilie is already such a character. We just had a day of laughing with this innocent little soul.”
“But it’s that old story,” Oldman adds, smiling. “As a grandparent, you know you can love them and spoil them and then give them back.” He laughs. “It’s a good gig.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
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