The Happy Sad Confused podcast is the end-of-year gift that keeps on giving this week. This week, the podcast’s guest was Academy Award winner Gary Oldman (“The Darkest Hour”). Oldman talked about his time in the “Harry Potter” series (he thought he was mediocre), he lamented never being directed by Quentin Tarantino (though speaking his dialogue in “True Romance”), and he says he was up for a villain role in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins,” before eventually landing the Jim Gordon good guy cop role instead.
Oldman also talked about a somewhat forgotten what-if from the past: he was offered the lead role in Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands” before Johnny Depp. Still, he turned it down immediately after reading the script, not even bothering to meet with the filmmaker.
The conversation began about roles Oldman turned down, and the actor insisted that he only passed on some roles because “I hate wasting people’s time.” In other words, if he wasn’t feeling a role, or a script, he would decline to go in for a meeting because he would never want to be in the position of meeting with a filmmaker, the director would like them, but he just wasn’t interested in the part. “I think it’s rude. I’ve just spent two hours with you, and no, I don’t want to do your film,” he explained.
“I didn’t go into Meet Tim Burton because I didn’t get the script,” he admitted about not really understanding the movie’s vision. “I read it and went, ‘There’s a castle on a hill, this guy’s got scissors [on his hands], there’s an Avon lady, pfff, I don’t get it.’ Anyhow, cut to a year later, I go and see the movie, and the camera tracks over all those multicolored houses, and it ends on this castle in the background, and I went [seemingly sheepishly disappointed in himself], ‘yeah, I get it.’”
In another interview from a few years back with Larry King (see below), Oldman expanded on his reasoning and suggested in addition to not understanding the “ridiculous” script, Burton was something of an “unknown” at the time, so that didn’t help (though maybe Oldman is misremembering or got the script way early because ‘Scissorhands’ came out in 1990 and Burton has already directed 1998’s “Beetlejuice” and 1999’s “Batman”).
It’s interesting to think of an alternative universe where Gary Oldman starred in the movie and became Tim Burton’s muse. After “Edward Scissorhands” in 1990, Depp would go on to star in eight more Tim Burton movies, including 2008’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” which earned Depp his third Best Actor In A Leading Role Oscar nomination.
“There have been a few that got away, and quite a few actually, but I can’t talk about it ’cause it’s not really fair to the people who ended up doing it,” he explained, teasing other significant projects he turned down.
What roles could he be talking about? Well, he submitted a recorded voice audition for General Grievous in “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” and said he had the role at one point; he turned down the villain role in “Speed 2: Cruise Control” (though that one he may not regret so much), was reportedly considered for Jim Carrey’s roles in “The Truman Show” (1998) and “Man On The Moon” (1999). He was also supposedly considered for Kurt Russell’s roles in “Tango & Cash” (1989) and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” (2017). There’s also a rumor that Oldman missed out on the role of Morpheus in “The Matrix,” but the actor has always claimed not to remember that offer when asked. Are there any others we missed? Can you imagine Oldman as Edward Scissorhands? Check out the entire conversation below.
