FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| FILM Lost in Space He's a street rat in Hollywood threads. He's perfected the three-day shadow, or else he only appears in public on every third day. He played the nihilistic punk rocker Sid Vicious, Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, and the first Goth Dracula. He is Gary Oldman. Famed for his refusal to be included in the Brit-pack of Daniel Day-Lewis, Rupert Graves and Kenneth Branagh, this rogue prince has made a habit of giving audiences what they need in a performance, instead of just what they want. Tucked away in his smoke-filled room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, wearing a suit (or at least appearing in the suit, but not really associating himself with it), he is promoting his new film, Lost in Space. Based on the same futuristic 'Swiss Family Robinson' premise as the original 1965 TV show, Lost in Space is about a family of five, plus Captain Don West, sent into space to colonize the planet Alpha Centuari. A saboteur, Dr. Zachary Smith (Oldman's character), slips on board the Jupiter II spacecraft to reprogram the Robot, a mobile environmental servant, to destroy the spacecraft after eight hours, along with all members of the crew. Smith is double-crossed and finds himself stranded on the ship as it launches into space. While the show was shamelessly geeky, it was also the quintessential nuclear family image which epitomized happy times in the blissed-out, pre-CNN '60s. So what the hell is a hardcore actor like Gary Oldman doing in this picture? The answer is, the film demands him. Sure, it packs a cast of William Hurt (Dark City), Mimi Rogers (Austin Powers), Heather Graham (Boogie Nights), Lacey Chabet (Party of Five), Matt LeBlanc (Friends), and the original voice of the Robot, but if Smith doesn't work, the film falls apart. And Oldman makes Smith work. "First of all, as an actor, there are a couple of one-liners which are delicious, but Smith is a part that is made up of moments," the actor says. "He's not really a part of the family, but every once in a while, he throws in a catty remark. Just to stand there and ask for a laugh on every line would be very easy, but cheap. So to give it a bit of body, I had to root it in some kind of reality." The villain, he says, "...is very easy and it's done often... and I'm living proof!" He puffs out his chest as if prepared to take a journalistic bullet for the crime of falling prey to repeating the same role repeatedly. But I refused to go there, knowing he's been there many times before and has a set of answers waiting. Besides, he does the bad guy much better than other actors. Oldman found it difficult to come into this part with so much of the character predetermined by the 1965 performance. "With Dracula, it was my interpretation even though it was Dracula on the page. You still read the line 'The children of the night, what sweet music they make,' I mean, every fucking Dracula said that, but there is a way of doing that which is unique and original. "John Geilgud said, 'Style is knowing what play you're in.' I was told to make Smith darker, a little more sinister," Oldman says. "At times we want to be really frightened of him, but you have to keep the twinkle in the eye." |