In an interview that has sparked plenty of controversy this morning, Gary Oldman told Playboy that he doesn’t like The Fifth Element. “Oh no, I can’t bear it,” Oldman said, in a quote that has already provoked outrage across social media and led to several think pieces excoriating Oldman for his stance on Luc Besson’s surreal sci-fi cult classic. Today many are asking asking whether Oldman’s inflammatory comments betray some deeply held prejudices against futuristic cab drivers.
Elsewhere, Oldman also stood up for Mel Gibson’s racist rants and Alec Baldwin’s homophobic outbursts, then hypothetically called Nancy Pelosi “a fucking useless cunt”—all to illustrate a larger point of criticizing what he sees as the ingrained hypocrisy of our culture’s political correctness. And, no doubt, to attempt to distract from his earlier, disparaging remarks about The Fifth Element.
Asked his thoughts about what Gibson had gone through in the past few years—when the actor was excoriated for saying, “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” and telling his ex-girlfriend on tape, “I hope you get raped by a pack of fucking n—-ers”—talk turned to the way our Internet-fueled culture has responded. Oldman yelled at the cloud:
OLDMAN: I just think political correctness is crap. That’s what I think about it. I think it’s like, take a fucking joke. Get over it…. No one can take a joke anymore. I don’t know about Mel. He got drunk and said a few things, but we’ve all said those things. We’re all fucking hypocrites. That’s what I think about it. The policeman who arrested him has never used the word nigger or that fucking Jew? I’m being brutally honest here. It’s the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy. Or maybe I should strike that and say “the N word” and “the F word,” though there are two F words now.
PLAYBOY: The three-letter one?
OLDMAN: Alec calling someone an F-A-G in the street while he’s pissed off coming out of his building because they won’t leave him alone. I don’t blame him. So they persecute. Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him—and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, “That fucking kraut” or “Fuck those Germans,” whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going, “Isn’t that shocking?”
Oldman also had some words for what he sees as a liberal bias in this, the Jew-run media of 1942, where we’re all just lily-livered pantywaists hiding from those damnable krauts, while the Good Time Charlies yuk it up.
OLDMAN: Well, if I called Nancy Pelosi a cunt—and I’ll go one better, a fucking useless cunt—I can’t really say that. But Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can, and nobody’s going to stop them from working because of it. Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it. He said to Seth MacFarlane this year, “I thought you were going to do the Oscars again. Instead they got a lesbian.” He can say something like that. Is that more or less offensive than Alec Baldwin saying to someone in the street, “You fag”? I don’t get it… It’s our culture now, absolutely. At the Oscars, if you didn’t vote for 12 Years a Slave you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say.
Indeed, Oldman recognized that even he had to be very careful about what he said, because after the interview—which also included his thoughts on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death (“I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but maybe he looked in the mirror and always saw that very pale sort of fat kid”) and the Pope (“Oh, fuck the Pope!”)—he added, “So this interview has gone very badly. You have to edit and cut half of what I’ve said, because it’s going to make me sound like a bigot.” Of course, this being the liberal media, the interviewer didn’t, and now his thoughts on The Fifth Element are right out there for everyone to see.