Gary Oldman played a series of villains before landing the role of James Gordon in Batman Begins. But he was originally approached to play a different character.
“If I remember correctly, they approached me to play a villain, it may have been Scarecrow,” Oldman, 67, told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to play another weirdo.’ It may have been Doug [Urbanski] who said: ‘What about Jim Gordon?’ To his credit, Nolan thought about it, found it interesting.”
He continued, “It’s like we’ve been talking about good fortune. I was in the running for the role of Scarecrow, and after Chris met me he found the idea of me playing Jim Gordon very intriguing.”
The villain role ultimately went to Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy.
“[It was] the first time Chris [Nolan] worked with Cillian,” Oldman recalled. “So if that hadn’t happened, would he have gone on to play Oppenheimer?”
The Harry Potter actor — who got his start acting in theatre in London in the late 1970s — would go on to star as police commissioner Jim Gordon in all three of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy films, helping him break the “rent-a-villain” typecast.
“There was certainly a time where I felt that I was being sort of typecast,” he told the outlet. “I was a sort of ‘rent-a-villain,’ you know what I mean? But when you get known for those kinds of roles, it’s a hard ship to turn around.”
According to Oldman, breaking from the persona was “a conscious decision.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I put myself out of work to wait for something to come along that was as far away from the sort of villainous world I was in.”
