At the Los Angeles press junket for The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman confessed he's not an expert on all things Batman. Oldman's not into comic books and therefore had no idea what becomes of his character, Lt. James Gordon, over the course of the comic book series. "I was never a comic book kid," said Oldman. "The format irritates me. 'Do I read here? Is that comment his or hers?' Then it goes to the next frame and I'm thinking, 'Is he talking to him or her?' It irritates me. I can't get on with it at all so I really don’t know much… I know Barbara becomes Batgirl, but we’ll never see that, not in the hands of Chris Nolan, at least."
Oldman's played more than his share of villains and so he relished being able to play a truly decent man amongst a batch of villains first in Batman Begins and again in The Dark Knight. "You have to resolve yourself, when you play a good guy – and I’ve wanted to play a good guy for a while - I’ve tried to turn a ship around, and it’s a big ship to turn around. You can’t do it overnight. I just got into this thing of bad guys. You know, you come onto the scene, like Sid & Nancy, and no one really knows who you are. Up to that point, I had had a career in theatre. I've been in comedies and I've been in musicals. I’ve been in all sorts of things. And then you do that sort of performance and slowly your career narrows and narrows and narrows."
I’ve played bad guys because I've worked with people who have had less imagination than Christopher Nolan. Chris Nolan saw Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. It takes someone with great insight to look at that performance, recognize what he is doing, and cast him for The Joker, even though he has never, ever done a performance like that. Less good directors see you in something and say, 'I want that.' Then you turn up and they say, 'No, I just want you to do that thing I saw you do.' So I’ve wanted to play a good guy, but you have to sort of get out of your way when you play a good guy. You can’t do too much. Gordon is the vase, and Batman and The Joker are the flowers," explained Oldman.
Asked about his approach to playing Gordon, Oldman responded, "You've got to service what's there on the page. You know, Heath can take those lines and he's got the freedom in the role to just take it places. I think it also reflects in the way that it's shot. There's immediacy and a danger in the scenes with Heath. Chris just says, 'You know what? Put it on a Steadicam, put it on a handheld, and let's see what this kid does. Let's just sort of see what he's going to do as The Joker,' and there's this sort of freedom there. You don't have that with Gordon. You're more - you're reigned in, which I like, which I think is equally challenging and fun. But you can understand why actors always like the villains and the bad guys rather than the good guys."
But Oldman admits he wouldn't be adverse to playing a Batman villain. "I wouldn't mind a go at The Riddler. I used to like The Riddler in the TV series," said Oldman. "I think it's the suit with the question marks. I think I like the gear."
Heath Ledger tackled the role of the main villain, The Joker, in The Dark Knight and Oldman spoke about his memories of Ledger and their time spent together on the set. "Really good actors, as Heath was, go along and they have good careers. It's like they're sort of traveling at subsonic speed, and occasionally they go through the sound barrier. You can think of people like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon… There's certain landmark performances where you just think that they just fly. And Heath has done that here. He's just tuning in to a radio station - he's got a frequency that none of us can hear. It was like he found something and I knew it was special the first day I worked with him. I called a friend and they said, 'How is it?' And I said, 'It's good, it's good.' And they said, 'How's Heath as The Joker?' I said, 'He's going to be sensational. You can tell already.' How good he turned out to be is beyond my expectation, really."
"People talk about the intensity of someone like Christian [Bale], and I've heard someone say, 'Christian's a method actor.' Well, Christian's still alive. [pausing] I mean, Heath, in between takes, would laugh and joke and sit down on the curb and have a cigarette and talk about Matilda. And I think it's just the sort of thing that everybody wants to go, 'Oh, it's the role. It drove him…' You'd have to be neurologically f--king mental, you'd have to have a disorder to play a part and let it affect you so much that you can't sleep and that you - you know what I mean? Don't you think? People want a darker story than there really is, because my experience of him, and I don't know if he had substance abuse in the past, and people talk about partying and the stuff he used to do, but I was never witness to that. I worked with a sweet kid who had such a heart, who was a lovely guy. I worked with this guy who was completely committed to the role and the work, wanted more than anything to be taken seriously as an actor. He was on time, he knew the lines, and he was a nice kid."
There's already talk of a potential posthumous Oscar nomination for Ledger and Oldman believes Ledger does in fact deserve to be recognized. "Yeah, I think so. I think the Academy tend to overlook movies like this. They somehow seem to don't take it so seriously because it just doesn't fall into their thing. They don't tend to look at work in movies like this. But in this case I think the acting is so good, I think his performance is so good, I think it's going to be very hard to avoid it."
