Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 14, 2001, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
When millions of people sat down to view Hannibal during its record-setting opening weekend, they were all prepared for another chapter in the chilling saga of serial killer Hannibal Lecter and intrepid FBI agent Clarice Starling. But what they likely didn’t expect—even if they had read Thomas Harris’ novel—was to be confronted with a new visage of horror in the very first scene. It is here that audiences are introduced (earlier than in the book) to Mason Verger, the hideously scarred survivor of a Lecter attack who still seeks vengeance over a decade later. And rather than be coy with the character, director Ridley Scott gives us an unflinching look at Verger’s mangled features from the get-go, before the film goes on to reveal that his heart is as twisted as his face.
What the film does obscure, however, is the identity of the actor playing the role. Until the end credits (unless one is sharp-eyed enough to recognize him from a surreal flashback to his and Lecter’s fateful meeting), there’s no indication that Verger is played by British actor Gary Oldman. But the revelation is not too much of a surprise, as Oldman has made his name playing offbeat, frequently bizarre characters in a string of diverse features, sometimes in heavy makeup. Horror fans know him best as the multifaceted Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and he’s also been Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, dreadlocked villain Drexl in True Romance, Beethoven in Immortal Beloved by Bernard Rose (Candyman), corrupt DEA agent Stansfield in Léon: The Professional, the evil Zorg in The Fifth Element and a slimy Congressman in last year’s acclaimed The Contender.
“As I am unofficially the man of many faces, and I’m playing the man with no face, we thought we’d have a bit of fun with it,” Oldman says of the decision to go unbilled in the main credits and the film’s publicity material. “We thought it would be great—the man with no name and no face.”
It took five hours a day for makeup master Greg Cannom (reunited with Oldman from Dracula) and his team to turn the actor into Verger, but he bears no negative memories of the experience. “Ridley’s very good to work with, and he uses time well,” Oldman recalls. “It was about six hours—five hours and then we had the wig—and I would go to set immediately and we’d work seven hours or whatever it was. We worked through lunch, so we could have it at the end of the day, and I wouldn’t have a lot of hanging around. It’s odd, because you’ve almost worked a whole day just sitting in the chair. But I’ve done prosthetic makeup before, and Ridley is so prepared. It really makes it easier on the actor who’s got to wear that stuff if the director knows what they want.”
The actor adds that while he doesn’t necessarily seek out roles that require him to alter his appearance, such a transformation is central to how he approaches acting in general. “I’ve always approached it that way—long before Sid and Nancy, when I did theater,” he explains. “If you take Shelly Runyon in The Contender for example, why should he sound and look like me? You know, if I turned up with my hair like it is now and said, ‘OK, I’m Sid Vicious,’ it wouldn’t work. That’s how I see it; it’s all really part of the job. We’re all different, characters are different, so that’s part of the fun. It’s like dressing up for Halloween.”
If the physical process by which Oldman became Verger was a lengthy one, the actor notes that his mental preparation wasn’t nearly as consuming. “I just used the book, basically,” he says of his character research. “The backstory obviously changed somewhat, because we condensed 800 pages into 110. We know that he’s a pedophile, and that he was assigned to Hannibal Lecter as a patient for psychiatric evaluation, and then Hannibal disfigured him and left him for dead. Then my testimony was what got Hannibal arrested, and that’s why he’s incarcerated in Silence of the Lambs. There wasn’t a great deal of research. I don’t always give my characters a biography. If the writing is good, then it will tell you everything you need to know. All the beats and the emotion and the arcs, it’s kind of all there. I don’t work much beyond the text.”
While Verger is not quite a secondary villain in Hannibal’s story the way Silence’s Buffalo Bill was, his all-consuming lust to subject Lecter to hideous retribution—and his conspiring to use Starling as bait—makes it difficult to sympathize with him. Oldman avoided playing him as a monstrous figure, and found a comic side to Verger as well. “I try to give all my characters a level of humanity,” he says. “He’s sort of damaged goods—not just because of Lecter, I mean psychologically. This is a melodrama, and it’s very darkly humorous. I find the film very funny. At times it’s cartoonish; it’s much bigger than life. But thank heaven Ridley knew what kind of film he was making.
“You’d agree, I’m sure, that the tonality of the film is very consistent,” Oldman continues. “It might not be one we all like and agree with, but it’s got a signature. He knew what he was going for, and in that sense… I meet Lecter, and I come in in the wheelchair, and it’s like, ‘Mr. Bond…’” [Laughs]
Oldman recalls that Scott was particularly amused by his choice of voice for Verger, which he reveals was modeled on an unlikely source. “I found, not necessarily the rhythm, but certainly—Katharine Hepburn, I thought of,” he says. “That [does Hepburn’s voice] ‘Suddenly, Last Summer’ thing, I kind of used. The more I did it, the more Ridley would chuckle, and he’d come over and say, [whispers] ‘It’s funny, it’s decadent.’ You can’t have a speech where you’re going to have someone eaten alive, and you talk about an hors d’oeuvre of his feet, and say, ‘The biography of the character…’ [Laughs] You don’t worry about that, you’ve just got to know what movie you’re making!”
Having squared off against Hopkins before when the latter played Van Helsing in Dracula, Oldman enjoyed reuniting with the Oscar-winning thespian for Hannibal. “It was nice to see him, but I was in the makeup every time I worked with him [on Dracula]; remember, I’m in the bat costume and he comes in. But the flashback sequence was a fun day; I enjoyed doing that.” And what was used to stand in for the pieces of Verger’s face that Lecter feeds to the dogs? “Do you have Spam here?” Oldman replies. “I think it was like Spam.”
Currently working on getting his second directorial venture off the ground (he made his debut at the helm with 1997’s Nil by Mouth), Oldman says that his string of outside-the-mainstream parts has had to do as much with typecasting as with personal choice. “I’ve enjoyed most of them,” he notes, “but a lot of people in this sort of corporate age we’re in, where studios are taken over by Coca-Cola or whatever—they have to see something, you have to show them something. Because they say, ‘Well, he can’t be romantic’ or ‘He can’t do comedy.’ And you really have to show them that you can, because they’re not smart enough to look at Dracula and say, ‘Oh, he can be funny.’ I mean, I’m not offered every role. There are things I might want but don’t get, so you’re at the mercy of the industry and what comes across your desk.”
