TORONTO – In tackling the role of quintessential British sleuth George Smiley from “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” veteran actor Gary Oldman headed straight for the shadows.
Oldman says he wanted to explore a dark side to John le Carre’s classic literary hero. He hoped that zeroing in on Smiley’s rougher edges would set his interpretation apart from the Alec Guinness incarnation in the celebrated 1979 miniseries.
“That was a dragon in my head one had to sort of slay, because the memory of (Guinness) in this role is so emblazoned on the minds of people,” Oldman says in a recent phone interview from New York.
“He was the face of Smiley and for many (people) a definitive performance. So that was something, a fire that I guess one had to walk through. But ultimately we’re different people and we’re going to find things and bring different things to it.”
The 53-year-old Oldman infuses the elegant but low-key Smiley with a simmering tension that le Carre himself has remarked on, with the author describing it in production notes as a “pressed-down fury” as if Smiley is “waiting patiently to explode.”
“If I were to meet the Smiley of Alec Guinness on a dark night, my instinct would be to go to his protection. If I met Oldman’s, I think I just might make a run for it,” says le Carre, who published “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” in 1974 and whose real name is David Cornwell.
Oldman says he sought to evoke the same solitude and intelligence that Guinness brought to the part, but acknowledges he brings out a dangerous element.
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“I think maybe perhaps Alec Guinness was a little more huggable than me,” says Oldman, whose lengthy and varied career includes turns as Sex Pistols rocker Sid Vicious in 1986’s “Sid and Nancy,” Lee Harvey Oswald in 1991’s “JFK” and Dracula in 1992’s “Dracula.”
“There’s a slightly tough side to Smiley. He’s a great manipulator and a chess player and knows how to sort of navigate his way through all that sort of bureaucratic bull. He’s very good at that. And when he needs to – I think he operates with moral certainty, there’s no narcissism attached to it. I think he does it for Queen and country but when he needs to he can be a little sadistic, he can be a little cruel.”
The Cold War tale is set in 1973. Smiley has recently been forced out of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, a.k.a. MI6 and code-named the Circus, after a spy mission goes horribly awry. But when the government suspects the agency may have been infiltrated by someone working for the Soviets, Smiley is called back into action to root out the mole.
Oldman is joined by an all-star British cast including “The King’s Speech” Oscar-winner Colin Firth as Bill Haydon, a spy who may have an agenda of his own; veteran actor John Hurt as Control, the head of the agency under fire; “Inception”‘s Tom Hardy as an assassin on the run and “Sherlock”‘s Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s right-hand man.
It’s a quiet, cerebral film directed by the Swedish-born director Tomas Alfredson, who rose to fame with his 2008 brooding vampire film “Let the Right One In.” His English-language debut features a muted colour palette that bestows a cold, shabby atmosphere to the bygone era of East vs. West, dial-up telephones and clunky teletype machines.
Oldman describes the film as “a drink of water” amid the high-octane, action-packed thrillers more typical of today’s spy features.
“You have to watch and you have to listen and you have to work things out and it doesn’t undermine how smart you are,” says the 53-year-old actor, best known lately for playing supporting characters Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films and Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies, including the upcoming “The Dark Knight Rises.”
“It’s smart and it’s intelligent, it’s rich. You’re working from this great book. The source material, the deeper you would dig, the more interesting it became. The work on this was never dull, it was never arduous.”
Oldman, whose transformation included a silver hair rinse and carefully selected eyeglass frames, says le Carre was a valuable resource as he built his performance.
“I met him and used a little of his voice, the way John speaks,” he says. “You sometimes do that as an actor – it begins as an impersonation almost and then the more you work on a character, the further it moves away from that. But they’re just little things that you pick up. You’re like a bird kind of building a nest. You’ll take a twig from here and a leaf from there and you start to sort of piece it together.”
Oldman says he approached the role in much the same way an actor might approach classic stage heroes like Romeo, Hamlet or King Lear.
“You know … you play Hamlet, and you’re in the shadow of all the other great Hamlets that have been before you. But that makes it exciting, that keeps you on your toes.”
“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” opens in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal on Friday and heads to Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Ottawa on Jan. 20.
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