Gary Oldman talks about ‘Tinker, Tailor,’ Smiley and slaying the Guinness dragon

‘In my notes . . . .” Gary Oldman is waxing professorial, drawing his words out in a donnish drawl. The actor is seated behind an ornate desk in an ersatz “secret” room at the Spy Museum, a borderline-cheesy replica of a spy’s office in a fictional near-Eastern country. Oldman — who plays the British spy George Smiley in the new movie “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — slips right into character, peering over chic translucent glasses and smiling broadly under an avuncular mustache.

As convincing as Oldman is, on this day he cuts a decidedly more dashing figure than Smiley, John le Carre’s un-prepossessing master of Cold War tradecraft. Smiley would never wear such smart glasses, for example, nor could he pull off the navy-blue scarf printed with stylized horses. In fact, the great challenge of playing Smiley is giving his recessive character just enough life to be interesting but with enough passivity to be convincingly invisible.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

(Matt McClain/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - Gary Oldman during a November visit to the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Gallery

Ann Hornaday’s best films of 2011

“It’s a bit like rubbing your tummy and tapping your head at the same time,” Oldman says. He speaks slowly, considering each word with exacting care. “One hopes, just by the fact that one’s an actor, that you have some charisma, that when you’re on the screen people want to watch you. But then you’re trying to play someone who has anti-charisma.”

Of course, for anyone who remembers the 1979 miniseries of the same name, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” has already been definitively adapted. What’s more, Smiley has been definitively portrayed, by no less than Alec Guinness, perhaps the finest screen actor of his generation.

“I didn’t say yes immediately,” Oldman says of the inevitable comparisons, “because I thought, ‘How could one sort of slay that dragon?’ But in the end, I sort of played a trick with my head. I thought, ‘Well, there’s more than one Romeo; there’s more than one Hamlet; there’s more than one King Lear — so it was like a reinterpretation of a classical part.”

It takes nothing away from Guinness’s genius to say that Oldman has reinvented Smiley, lending the character more of an edge, a whiff of physical danger and relative youth (Guinness was in his 70s when he played Smiley; Oldman is 53). Although Smiley is still the watchful, quiet Everyman whose chief goal in life is not to be noticed, Oldman has found a vein of vigor and even anger in a man who, when “Tinker, Tailor” opens, finds he’s been betrayed by two people: his wife, Ann, and a mole within the British intelligence agency MI6, nicknamed the Circus, where he has worked his entire adult life.

In reading the book, “I discovered that there’s a little bit of a sadist, a meaner side to George,” Oldman says. “It’s what I call the tickle. ‘I’m just going to tickle them a bit, get them on the back foot.’ You know with passive aggressive people, you never quite know if they’re insulting you? It causes a sort of chemical reaction in your body. There’s a shift in the temperature, but you can’t quite work out what it is, what he does. And that’s why he’s the master interrogator.”