Gary Oldman "never ever" wanted to play Winston Churchill.
The 59-year-old actor recently won the BAFTA for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal as the wartime Prime Minister in the new Joe Wright movie ‘The Darkest Hour’ but admitted he never had any previous desire to play the iconic man in any movie.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Oldman said: "I just thought that the physicality was the biggest challenge. How the hell would I do that? If someone had said to me, Neville Chamberlain, I could have maybe wrapped my head around that. So the hurdle to leap was the physical – it was the elephant in the room. And so I forbade everyone around me to even mention him – don’t keep bringing him up! It’s never ever going to happen!"
Despite having continuous objections to star as Churchill, Oldman eventually succumbed and when asked why he took on the role in ‘The Darkest Hour’, the BAFTA-winning actor said it was because of film producer Eric Fellner.
He said: "God bless Eric Fellner, who I had started my career with. I’d done other things before ‘Sid & Nancy’, but you could say it was that movie where they say you ‘arrived on the scene’.
"And he thought of me for it. And it was five weeks of Churchill’s life, it’s not really a biopic. It wasn’t a huge, great big epic transformation in that sense.
"Then I went in and started to read around that period and learned things from the script I didn’t know.
"I just thought, ‘can that be right? Were we that perilously close?’ and so it just grabbed me."
Gary Oldman never ever had desire to play Winston Churchill
