Gary Oldman Quotes

Any actor who tells you that they have become the people they play, unless they’re clearly diagnosed as a schizophrenic, is bullshitting you.

My favorite meal would have to be good old-fashioned eggs, over easy, with bacon. Many others, but you can't beat that on a Sunday morning, especially with a cup of tea.

You choose your friends by their character and your socks by their color.

I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles' faces on it. It would be a collector's item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.

I enjoy playing characters where the silence is loud.

My passion and energy get mistaken for anger.

Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.

I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn't hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away.

Being an actor is a good way to earn a living. And to meet fabulous people. It's great to live very comfortably. I've been lucky, I've had a lot of fun with great roles, but it is true that if I were extremely rich, I would stop and I would go to play football on a beach in the Caribbean with my children.

You can play older than yourself. You can play younger than yourself up to a point, and then that just becomes impossible because you carry a weight with you that you can't shift, unless you have very boyish looks.

We're given a code to live our lives by. We don't always follow it, but it's still there.

Change is vital to any actor. If you keep playing lead after lead, you're really gonna dry up. Because all those vehicles wean you away from the truths of human behaviour.

I applaud anything that can take a kid away from a PlayStation or a Gameboy. That is a miracle in itself.

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

In the past, I’ve had my share of good reviews, but it’s always the crazy, scary, weirdo guy. 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?

And of course I've got kids of my own now, and they love me being in the Harry Potter films. I'm now part of a phenomenon. You become incredibly cool to your kids, and you get a young fan base. So you became the cool dad at school. You're suddenly hip.

So Harry Potter came in and it is nice that I have kids of the right age. I took them to London and they walked around the set and met Harry Potter and that is thrilling.

Overall I enjoy a certain anonymity. I live a very normal, very ordinary life.

Wanting to be a good actor is not good enough. You must want to be a great actor. You just have to have that.

The thing a drama school can't give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can't be taught, and you have to have intuition. It's an essential ingredient.

Whats fascinating is that when you write a script, its almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but youre not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

People who know me , they know I have a sense of humor, I'm a bit of a joker, a bit of a clown really, and I would love someone to exploit that side of me and send me a romantic comedy.

I like these calm little moments before the storm, it reminds me of Beethoven

Political correctness has become a straightjacket.

That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them.

Speaking very generally, I find that women are spiritually, emotionally, and often physically stronger than men.

I don't see a great difference between someone sending a robot or a drone to bomb people and controlling it on a PlayStation from another country. It's thousands of miles away as opposed to someone in an airplane who is thousands of feet away releasing a bomb.

To be honest, Im a little tired of playing bad guys. I long to do a comedy. But it was fun knocking Indiana Jones around.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

What other people think of me is none of my business.

I don't go to premieres. I don't go to parties. I don't covet the Oscar. I don't want any of that. I don't go out. I just have dinner at home every night with my kids. Being famous, that's a whole other career. And I haven't got any energy for it.

I don't think Hollywood knows what to do with me. I would imagine that when it comes to romantic comedies, my name would be pretty low down on the list.

I want my weekends off and I want to put my kids to bed. Those are good reasons to want to be in 'Batman 2'.

When you play a character that is so emotionally closed there are times when you ask yourself if you are doing enough and if it's reading. That is where you have a director, who is the barometer of what you are doing.

People have an idea that one is in control of a career, a lot more than you really are. You can engineer things to an extent. But you are at the mercy of what comes in across the desk.

You always hope that the cloak of inspiration will fall, and you'll be O.K.

To be able to do this job in the first place you've got to have a bit of an ego.

Being a good director is knowing sometimes when not to say something.

It's been said that alcoholics are egomaniacs with low self -esteem. It's the prefect description. Being larger than life and yet your pride is crushed with self- loathing.

I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father, and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up sometimes.

The script is your map of the world, isn't it? And if someone knows that if it's well-written, you get all of the beats, it will tell you everything you need to know.

Well, I needed the work - that's the honest answer. I haven't worked for a while, a couple of years. So I thought it would be nice to get back to work and earn some money.

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

Interesting things come your way but as you get older, your lifestyle changes. I don't want to travel; I don't want to be in a hotel room away from my family.

People imagine that actors are being offered everything and you are not. So things come in and sometimes there are things that I want and can't get a meeting on, or go to a different actors.

At the Oscars, if you didn't vote for '12 Years a Slave' you were a racist.

Shakespeare doesn't really write subtext, you play the subtext.

How do you remember all those lines? By forgetting everything else.