These days, the old man is what we see
In some earlier parallel universe of Batman’s Gotham City, it might have been Gary Oldman instead of Heath Ledger cackling and conniving as the maniacal Joker.
Nowadays, Oldman is upright cop Jim Gordon in Batman’s world or the solicitous Sirius Black, surrogate father to boy wizard Harry Potter.
This is not your father’s Gary Oldman, the actor who built his reputation on such characters as prince of punk-rock anarchy Sid Vicious, presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald or Dracula himself.
In fact, Oldman has kind of become your father – a pillar of paternalism, a symbol of saintliness. The man you want covering your back, rather than the one you would never turn your back on.
With his second turn as Batman ally Gordon in “The Dark Knight,” Oldman, 50, feels as though he has finally broken ranks with the bad boys and put to rest his typecasting as a go-to guy when filmmakers needed a villain.
“In the past, I’ve had my share of good reviews, but it’s always the crazy, scary, weirdo guy,” he says. “I don’t even know how it happened.
“Look at me. I mean, when I’m naked, I look like a bald chicken. How did I get to be a scary bad guy?”
It started in the mid-1980s when Oldman landed the lead in “Sid and Nancy,” a portrait of the self-destructive romance between the Sex Pistols’ Vicious and Nancy Spungen.
By the 1990s, his dark-tinged characters had turned into a full-blown rogue’s gallery: Oswald in “JFK.” The vampire in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” An Irish gangster in “State of Grace.” The terrorist mastermind in “Air Force One.”
The occasional romantic lead crept in, such as Ludwig von Beethoven in “Immortal Beloved.”
Yet Oldman mostly played the heavy until he was cast as Sirius in 2004’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” a role he reprised in the next two Potter flicks.
A year after “Azkaban,” Oldman co-starred in “Batman Begins” as the dogged, even-keeled policeman Gordon.
Though never a comic-book fan, Oldman did have an interest in Batman from the big-screen movies and the 1960s TV show. He was particularly intrigued with how director Christopher Nolan wanted to both re-imagine and explain the Gotham world with “Batman Begins.”
“All these questions that I think I’ve asked myself when I’ve been watching these movies: How does he do that? Where’d he get that from? Who made that for him? Does he go down into a workshop and like, solder that together?
“Chris says, ‘He’s a billionaire. He has the cowl made here and the mask made there,’ and he tries to give sort of a reality and logic to it. It’s pretty cool.”
The birthday bunch
Actress Diana Rigg (“The Avengers”) is 70. Guitarist Carlos Santana is 61. Actress Donna Dixon (“Bosom Buddies”) is 51. Singer Chris Cornell (Audioslave, Soundgarden) is 44. Actor Josh Holloway (“Lost”) is 39. Singer Elliott Yamin (“American Idol”) is 30. Actor John Francis Daley is 23. Dancer/country singer Julianne Hough (“Dancing with the Stars”) is 20. Actress Billi Bruno (“According to Jim”) is 12.