Gary Oldman is a transformative actor – someone who embodies roles through performance and delivery, but also revels in the possibilities of Hollywood make-up, from his Oscar-winning turn as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, to the lavish costuming of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But for Mank – David Fincher’s upcoming film about Herman J. Mankiewicz, the writer of Citizen Kane – the beloved British actor stepped away from those trappings to deliver a much more stripped-down performance.
Fincher requested “Gary au naturel” for his tale about the making of a Golden Age masterpiece, which offered the actor a challenge. “I thought, ‘Oh, fucking hell!’,” Oldman tells Empire in the November issue. “I can’t remember the last time I did that. I’ve always got something! I was thinking, ‘I don’t know about that.’ I don’t look anything like Mank. There’s a similarity with [Tom Burke as] Welles and Amanda Seyfried] kind of looks like [film star and Hearst’s lover] Marion Davies, and you’ve got this pale make-up on Charles Dance, so he resembles [William Randolph] Hearst. But I didn’t have anything I could anchor to. Then, once we started, I thought, ‘Yeah, Dave was right.’ No tricks. No nothing. Just: here it is. I’ve embraced it.”
As seen in Empire’s feature about the making of Mank – which takes David Fincher back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, with a screenplay written by his own late father, Jack Fincher – here’s an exclusive new image of Oldman and the director working together on set.
And here’s Oldman as Mank, with Tom Pelphrey as his younger brother Joseph and a junior aide on an MGM studio soundstage.
Read Empire’s full Mank story in the Chadwick Boseman tribute issue, on sale Thursday 1 October.
Mank is coming soon to Netflix.