You choose your friends by their character and your socks by their color.
Gary Oldman
People who know me, they know I have a sense of humor, I’m a bit of a joker, a bit of a clown really, and I would love someone to exploit that side of me and send me a romantic comedy.
Gary Oldman
Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.
Gary Oldman
My favorite meal would have to be good old-fashioned eggs, over easy, with bacon. Many others, but you can’t beat that on a Sunday morning, especially with a cup of tea.
Gary Oldman
I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn’t hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away.
Gary Oldman
I did have a knack for playing weirdos. There’s still sort of this perception of me out there as being this crazy guy.
Gary Oldman
Well, I needed the work – that’s the honest answer. I haven’t worked for a while, a couple of years. So I thought it would be nice to get back to work and earn some money.
Gary Oldman
You can play older than yourself. You can play younger than yourself up to a point, and then that just becomes impossible because you carry a weight with you that you can’t shift, unless you have very boyish looks.
Gary Oldman
Wanting to be a good actor is not good enough. You must want to be a great actor. You just have to have that.
Gary Oldman
Political correctness has become a straightjacket.
Gary Oldman
It’s a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they’ve demolished so many landmarks. It’s a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It’s a strange town, it’s this sprawling suburb, and then there’s a city, the old town.
Gary Oldman
I know what it means to do a job… I worked in a factory. I respect people in the service industry. What irritates me more is when people aren’t respectful. There’s a lot of nonsense behavior, especially in a place like Hollywood. The money, the power, they create little monsters.
Gary Oldman
Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where the person who is wearing the director’s hat is only trying to justify his position.
Gary Oldman
Rather like Batman, I embody the themes of the movie which are the values of family, courage and compassion and a sense of right and wrong, good and bad and justice.
Gary Oldman
I wanted to play Dracula because I wanted to say: ‘I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you.’ It was worth playing the role just to say that line.
Gary Oldman
I was brought up by my mother and my two sisters, although they’re older than me and fled the nest very young, so I was technically raised as an only child, but I was very much loved.
Gary Oldman
I’m still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent – you get contaminated after so long.
Gary Oldman
I like celluloid, I like film, I like the way that when a movie is projected it sort of breathes a little in the gate. That’s the magic of it to me.
Gary Oldman
And costume is so important for an actor. It absolutely helps to get into character; it’s the closest thing to you, it touches you. Some actors like to go into make-up and then put their clothes on, but I like to dress first; that’s my routine.
Gary Oldman
How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
Gary Oldman
Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.
Gary Oldman
I like a cheese and pickle. Nice cheese and pickle on a real old-fashioned bread. Ploughman’s lunch.
Gary Oldman
I didn’t do drugs. It wasn’t my thing. But the drink was terrible. Today when I look back, it’s like I was another person. You could call it a coping mechanism, but that would be an excuse. I just drank too much.
Gary Oldman
There’s no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine line as a parent because you are civilizing these raw things. They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table. At some point, you have to say, ‘We’re gonna have to clean that up because you don’t paint with coffee on a table.’
Gary Oldman
I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They’re all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him.
Gary Oldman
I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.
Gary Oldman
I hadn’t worked for a couple of years so I thought it would be nice to earn some money and pay the bills.
Gary Oldman
There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn’t have got Osama bin Laden – it took us years, but it happened.
Gary Oldman
But you see, I have played more good guys than I have played villains.
Gary Oldman
Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.
Gary Oldman
I applaud anything that can take a kid away from a PlayStation or a Gameboy. That is a miracle in itself.
Gary Oldman
I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles’ faces on it. It would be a collector’s item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.
Gary Oldman
I have three kids who like Harry Potter so I was sort of aware of it. You can’t really move from it: it’s on buses, in stores, it’s everywhere. One of my kids has read the books; the other two are too small but they like the movies.
Gary Oldman
I wasn’t ever a huge fan of comics. Just not one of those kids, you know?
Gary Oldman
I’m not the best audience for that because I’m not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.
Gary Oldman
If one could have a wish, or an alternative life, I would’ve liked to have been John Lennon.
Gary Oldman
Interesting things come your way but as you get older, your lifestyle changes. I don’t want to travel; I don’t want to be in a hotel room away from my family.
Gary Oldman
It’s always hard when you’re playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There’s a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone’s idea of that.
Gary Oldman
It’s becoming increasingly harder and harder; there’s no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren’t any, they don’t exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget with foreign sales, now everybody wants a marketable angle.
Gary Oldman
My big love was the Beatles. I was more into music.
Gary Oldman
People have an idea that one is in control of a career, a lot more than you really are. You can engineer things to an extent. But you are at the mercy of what comes in across the desk.
Gary Oldman
People imagine that actors are being offered everything and you are not. So things come in and sometimes there are things that I want and can’t get a meeting on, or go to a different actors.
Gary Oldman
Shakespeare doesn’t really write subtext, you play the subtext.
Gary Oldman
So Harry Potter came in and it is nice that I have kids of the right age. I took them to London and they walked around the set and met Harry Potter and that is thrilling.
Gary Oldman
Speaking very generally, I find that women are spiritually, emotionally, and often physically stronger than men.
Gary Oldman
What’s fascinating is that when you write a script, it’s almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you’re not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.
Gary Oldman
My passion and energy get mistaken for anger.
Gary Oldman
I want my weekends off and I want to put my kids to bed. Those are good reasons to want to be in ‘Batman 2’.
Gary Oldman
I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up at sometimes. I don’t drink anymore but my alcoholic head occasionally says different. ‘Nil By Mouth’ was a love letter to my father because I needed to resolve some issues in order to be able to forgive him.
Gary Oldman
And of course I’ve got kids of my own now, and they love me being in the Harry Potter films. I’m now part of a phenomenon. You become incredibly cool to your kids, and you get a young fan base. So you became the cool dad at school. You’re suddenly hip.
Gary Oldman
I don’t go to premieres. I don’t go to parties. I don’t covet the Oscar. I don’t want any of that. I don’t go out. I just have dinner at home every night with my kids. Being famous, that’s a whole other career. And I haven’t got any energy for it.
Gary Oldman
Nil By Mouth’ was a bit autobiographical, but as I always pointed out at the time, that’s not my dad.
Gary Oldman