NEED TO KNOW
Gary Oldman just didn’t “get” Edward Scissorhands.
In an Aug. 18 interview with The Hollywood Reporter about his career, the Oscar-winning actor, 67, talked about how he was asked to play Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins. “And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to play another weirdo,’ ” he said. They ended up casting him as Jim Gordon instead.
He called it “good fortune” because Cillian Murphy was cast as Scarecrow, which started Nolan’s relationship with the actor. “So if that hadn’t happened, would he have gone on to play Oppenheimer?” Oldman mused.
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The outlet asked about another “sliding-door” moment for Oldman: When he turned down the lead in Edward Scissorhands. At the time, Oldman had already found success with movies like 1986’s Sid and Nancy and 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears.
“I was on Tim Burton’s list for the role of Edward Scissorhands. It was a small list,” he said. “My agent thought I had a really good chance of getting it.”
“They said to me, ‘Read the script.’ They sent the script over, and I basically said, ‘I don’t get it,’ ” he said. At the time, he added, he didn’t have “Tim Burton’s whole body of work.”
“I read this quirky, strange little script, and I didn’t get it,” he remembered, saying the story “didn’t register” with him. He told his agent, “I just don’t understand this. It’s not my cup of tea.”
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He didn’t even meet director Burton, 66. “Then Scissorhands came out and I went to the cinema to watch it. With that opening shot — all those brightly colored houses, and then the camera pans up to the castle-like thing on the hill — within two minutes I went, ‘I get it!’ ” he said.
Instead, Johnny Depp starred as Edward, the young man with scissors for hands who’s taken in by a suburban family and falls in love with their daughter Kim (Winona Ryder). Depp went on to star in seven more of Burton’s films, including 1999’s Sleepy Hollow, 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and 2010’s Alice in Wonderland.
Oldman appeared widely on film in the ‘90s, with movies like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Air Force One. In the mid-2000s, as he joined Nolan’s Batman trilogy, he also began playing Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films. He received his first Oscar nomination in 2012 for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and won an Oscar in 2018 for Darkest Hour. This year, he received his second consecutive Emmy nomination for Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, which returns for its fifth season this September.
