“I have played bad guys,” declares the actor who’s played Sid Vicious, Pontius Pilate, Dracula, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Devil himself. During our interview for “RoboCop,” Gary Oldman explained that he was so consistently typecast as a villain that he knew he had to “turn the ship around.”
“But now… bad guys are more expensive. So they have to pay me a lot of money to play the bad guy,” Oldman said and he laughed.
The “Harry Potter”/”Dark Knight”/”Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy” good guy is most certainly a “good guy” in the new remake of “RoboCop,” drafted as Dr. Dennett Norton who outfits the titular hero with his functioning robotic cop suit, who rails against the corporate overlords who wish to push RoboCop’s abilities and functions beyond their bounds and before he’s ready. Oldman said the believability of this redux helps to re-tell the story — the technological advances in military and security make the film’s context feel all the more real. Plus his director Jose Padilha forced anything out of the script that was “really stupid.”
Check out the full interview with Oldman above, on security versus liberty, free will, America’s motion toward rights being taken away and career-as-Titanic.
“RoboCop” hits theaters on Wednesday (Feb. 12).