Controversial Gary Oldman interview blasts The Fifth Element, also defends Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin
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.