‘Happier than I’ve ever been’: at 68, Gary Oldman is not ready to slow down yet
Gary Oldman, who has just finished filming the seventh series of Slow Horses, talks about finding happiness both at home and on the job
Two years ago, British actor Gary Oldman found himself in Yorkshire for the wedding of his oldest son, Alfie.
As Oldman’s other sons, Gulliver and Charlie, were there too, along with his wife, Gisele Schmidt, and his stepson, William, Oldman thought it would be a lark to make the hour-long drive through the countryside to the York Theatre Royal, where he began his acting career in 1979.
The boys were intrigued, as they had heard stories over the years. Before Oldman burst on the film scene in the 1980s playing punk rocker Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy and British playwright Joe Orton in Stephen Frears’ Prick Up Your Ears, he had turned heads in a run of plays throughout England.
Then he was, as he puts it, “kidnapped by cinema”. Wanting to see their father’s career origins, the family piled into a couple of cars and headed out.
“It was a lovely kind of homecoming, a debt paid, really,” Oldman says.
Walking around York Theatre Royal, thinking he needed to pinch himself because, really, how could it be 45 years since he first took that stage, Oldman met Paul Crewes, the theatre’s CEO.
“Do you think you might want to ever return to the stage,” Crewes asked Oldman, “and if so, where might that be?” Oldman thought for a moment and replied: “I think I’m standing on it.”