Gary Oldman says there are no high-octane car chases in the big-screen version of the classic spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
‘They’re in the mind; there are no real car chases, rather it’s like a high-stakes chess game with everyone watching how the other person moves,’ said the actor who plays John le Carré’s quietly ruthless hero George Smiley in the film, which opens nationwide on September 16 and which could land him his first Oscar nomination.
‘I’ve played so many of these big extrovert characters, and it was the prospect of doing something that is so still, so quiet,’ Oldman told me when I asked what attracted him to playing Smiley in director Tomas Alfredson’s movie.
Oldman added Alfredson was very quiet with the camera, taking an almost voyeuristic approach by shooting with long lenses. ‘It was as if he was eavesdropping, like a peeping Tom, which is what you sort of want for a spy film,’ Oldman observed.
The actor spent a lot of time creating Smiley’s ‘look’. The process involved, among other things, lunching with David Cornwell (Le Carré’s real name) in order to borrow a few mannerisms. And as I revealed back in November, Oldman tried on hundreds of glasses frames at a vintage eyewear store in Pasadena before finding the Smiley spectacles.
‘I also put on a bit of a tummy for the scene where he swims in the pond at Hampstead. God, it was cold!’ he said, recalling how freezing the water was after the third take. ‘I wanted to be suitably middle-aged, so I ate a lot of treacle sponge and custard on the set and built up a little bit of a middle-aged paunch. I called it eating for George.’
He enjoyed working with his co-stars Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds, Kathy Burke, Toby Jones and John Hurt (who, interestingly, was considered for Smiley early on in the casting process but who now plays Control), as well as younger names such as Stephen Graham, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy.
Hardy (left) plays the rough-and-tumble Ricki Tarr, who unwittingly sets off the alarms about a Russian mole buried deep in British intelligence. Producer Tim Bevan, who made the film for Working Title and Optimum Releasing, said that Hardy ‘looks like a young Robert Redford in the film’. Hardy and Oldman have also been working together on the new Batman picture, The Dark Knight Rises
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