Gary Oldman on Slow Horses future: 'Netflix disappoints fans by axing shows – Apple don't do that'

Now the 67-year-old is back on the big screen in Parthenope, a dreamy new film from director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), where he becomes real-life boozy author John Cheever. Given his own battle with alcohol — he’s been sober for more than 25 years — this time Oldman is acting from genuine experience.

You play author John Cheever in Parthenope. How familiar were you with him?

I’d read The Swimmer years ago, but I’m not a student of John Cheever. I know a little about him. I looked at some interviews to get a sense of him, but I stuck very much to what Paolo wanted me to play. Everything I say in the movie is Paulo; it’s not quotes of Cheever. So, in that respect I felt safe, that it wasn’t really biographical.

You’ve played many real-life figures over the years, from Sid Vicious to Lee Harvey Oswald. Do you enjoy the challenge?

I find the biographical stuff thrilling. I love being a detective and researching. It makes it tactile. You can go in and touch the history, rather than it just being all imagination. I enjoy the process.

Back in the 1990s, you played a lot of villains. Did you consciously shift away from that?

It was all fun for a while. And then I did Mank, then Slow Horses and then Cheever. I put a stop to the villains. Now I’m in my alcoholic period!

What has been the riskiest role you’ve taken on?

Playing Churchill [in the 2017 film Darkest Hour]. It worked out OK, but I’d turned it down half a dozen times. It was partly my wife [singer/actress Alexandra Edenborough] who said, “Go out there and walk on the wire. It could be great, but even if you fall and it’s no good, you’ve got to stand on the set and say: ‘We shall fight you on the beaches.’ ” And I thought: “You’ve got a point there.”

Did your perception of Churchill change afterwards?

Well, the volume of words he produced is staggering. He wrote more words than Shakespeare and Charles Dickens put together. He wrote about 50 books, all those famous speeches. And not only did he write all those, but he wrote all the day-to-day stuff, like memos and letters. The achievement of one guy who could write all that, paint those pictures, take on the Nazis, smoke that many cigars, drink that much in his life – I had great admiration for him!

Is admiration important to you?

I think the worst thing you can do is inspire disappointment. I was in The Scarlet Letter with Demi Moore and I had intermittent bouts of boozing during filming. It was towards the end of [my drinking] where I thought, “If I carry on like this…” I was in a very dark place. I drank too much in the lunch hour. It was such a destructive thing. I got back on the set to do quite a big scene and I got through it. You wouldn’t really know but I was quite tipsy. And the next day, I said to her, “I’m so sorry, you must hate me.” I was mortified that I’d been so unprofessional. And she said to me, “I don’t hate you. It’s OK. I’m just disappointed.”

It’s been a long time since you directed the film Nil by Mouth in 1997. Do you want to get back behind the camera again?

A project I have is Flying Horse, about the beginnings of cinema and Edward Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer. But I’ve had it for 11 years and I can’t get it made! It’s period and I want $30 million to make it. I know what it would cost to do it properly.

Is there anything that you regret turning down?

I won’t mention which, but I’ve passed on things that have given people their careers. I passed on something someone won an Oscar for… But I might not have won the Oscar. It would have been a different film. You never know.

After four seasons of Slow Horses are you keen to continue?

Obviously, if they want to keep us on the air and we’ve got an audience! It’s Apple writing the cheques… Speaking of disappointment, have you noticed that some of the streamers can really disappoint their audiences? Like Netflix will give you a season of something or other, and they just go: “We’re pulling it.” Apple will not do that. We’re working on writing number six. Now, I don’t know whether we’ll eventually end up doing it, but we’ve filmed five and there’s eight books altogether.

And finally, what’s the best advice you’ve been given?

Anthony Hopkins once said to me, “Do you know what the shortest prayer in the world is?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “F*** ’em!”

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