-I was reading a lot about you, and I want to talk about
this movie, "Darkest Hour." It´s just phenomenal how you transform
into Winston Churchill. I mean, it´s --
I just can´t believe it. I mean just the way
you´re hunched over -- I just -- Anyway.
We´ll get into that. I read somewhere that you do impressions, too,
as well, of other actors. -[ Laughs ]
-Is that true? -Yeah, but I -- they don´t hang in the hall of fame
as great impressions. I just do them
to amuse myself, so -- -That´s what I do every night. -Yes. I don´t need an audience. [ Laughter ] -Like, who do you do? -Well, you know,
I´ll see something. I´ll be driving in the car,
and I´ll see Home Depot, and then suddenly, I´m like --
like Bob, you know -- -Robert De Niro. -[ As De Niro ] Yeah. [ Laughter ] I got to --
I got to get some screws. [ Laughter and applause ] [ Normal voice ] Or my --
my son, Gulliver, he´s 20, and he´s a lovely kid, but he just finds it
very difficult to get up. -Yeah. -So he always says to me, "I really need
to be somewhere tomorrow. Will you -- Please,
would you give me a call?" And I´ll go in
and wake him up as, you know, Al Pacino
or Chris Walken. You know, and I say -- [ As Walken ]
"Uh, uh, uh, Gully! Come on. Y-Y-You got to get up.
It´s crazy." [ Laughter ] -Come on! That is hall of fame material!
That´s what I wanted! [ Cheers and applause ] I love you, man. Let´s talk about "Darkest Hour." -Yeah.
-Because man, oh, man. Did you think, like, when they
offered you this role -- Winston Churchill, I mean...
-Yeah. -...did you go like,
"Oh, I can´t do that"? -Yeah,
no I do that with every part. -You do?
-Yeah. -Really?
-Yeah. -Do you over-think it?
-Yeah, I think, "Well, I wouldn´t cast me. Why
don´t they get someone else?" -Is that right?
-Yeah. It´s part of how I have to -- I think, now,
over so many years -- and I do it almost every time that I think it must
be part of the process -- that I need to come from a place of self-loathing
or something, you know? -Yeah.
-Yeah. -Maybe that is something, yeah. -Yeah, something crazy about it. But Churchill, obviously,
you know, this iconic figure, you´re being asked
to play who -- arguably the greatest Briton
who ever lived... -Yeah, I agree.
-...you know, to some. -I see you, and I don´t even
remotely see Winston Churchill, like, just right now. -Yeah, yeah. -I mean, I see a studly man on the cover of magazines
and a movie star. and a man...
[ Cheers and applause ] -I like being called studly. -Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Take a look at this.
Look at this. [ Audience oohs ] Is that insane?
That´s Gary Oldman. Isn´t that unbelievable? What a great job they did,
makeup. Here´s the one thing. First of all,
just to act in general is hard. Trust me, I´ve tried. And, uh -- We´ll talk
about those movies later. But then how long would
does it take to get those prosthetics on? -It takes --
it´s 3 hours 15 minutes for the face and the wig, and then with the padding
and the suit and everything, it was just a little under
four hours. -Yeah, and then
you have to go to work. -And then you do a 12-hour day, and then after the -- and then it´s an hour
to take it off. I mean -- -And it was a phenomenal job. Who did that? -We went to --
We found the guy -- It wasn´t completely
contingent on getting Kazuhiro, but I did say there was only one man in
the world that could do this, and it´s a guy
called Kazuhiro Tsuji, and he´s a Japanese artist. And he retired
from the movie business because actors wouldn´t
sit still in the chair. -Yeah, I would get too fidgety. "Let´s go. I gotta do my scene
and get out." -And you´ve got to -- So anyway, he was local, and I said, "Please, please,
please do this." And I guess
he´s going to go back to being a fine artist now. -But I mean, even like
the -- the -- the neck fat. -No, the neck --
-I mean -- You know? Right? I mean, I watch for it,
because if I see a bad wig or something,
I´m out of the movie. I´m like, "Ah, I don´t buy it." -But even like the pores
in the skin and the thing. -The close-ups.
-I mean, people would come to me on the set and, like,
stand an inch from me, and they would --
they would marvel at -- They couldn´t work out
where, you know, it started and I began. [ Laughter ] -But then you´d become
his mannerisms and just walking and walking with your hands
behind your back, which only old people do,
I think. No one does that anymore. No one walks with their hands
behind their back anymore. They should bring that back. But you -- you do that.
-"Bring it back." -Yeah, and there´s humor in it,
as well, and a lot of things
I didn´t even know. But you smoked all these cigars. I´m like --
I know it seems, like, silly, but if I smoked that many
cigars, even as a joke, I would throw up. -No, I had --
[ Laughter ] I had nicotine poisoning. I got through
$30,000 worth of cigars. [ Audience oohs ]
-They´re real cigars, right? -Yeah, they were the real
Churchill cigars, and we had a break
over Christmas. And people went to decorate
their Christmas trees and do all of that, and I went and had
a colonoscopy. [ Laughter ] -Merry Christmas.
[ Laughs ] What do you give
the man that has everything? Yeah, exactly, yeah. A colonoscopy.
There you go. -Yes. There you go. [ Applause ] Joe Wright is the director. He did a fantastic job. Kristin Scott Thomas.
-Yeah. -I´m so happy to see her
in the movies again. -Come back from --
-Theater. -Yeah.
-Oh, I love her. And it´s set -- Basically,
it´s five weeks, right? -Yeah, five very crucial weeks. It´s 1940, set over the summer. The first, really, the 20 days of the premiership of Churchill,
and Hitler´s on the move, and Britain want to do
a peace deal with Hitler. They want to sort of capitulate
and make some kind of, I guess, some kind of living arrangement,
you know, that wouldn´t have -- that would definitely
not have worked out. -Of course not. -And it was one man, Churchill,
who said, "No. We´re not giving up
everything we have. We´re going to fight." And, uh, it changed
the course of civilization.
