The Religion and Political Views of Gary Oldman

Gary Oldman was born and raised in London, England.

Oldman's upbringing was contentious. His father left the family when Oldman was seven years-old and he has said his childhood memories are of a drab, dreary, poor London neighborhood and a tyrannical school.[1] Couple that with no evidence of a childhood religion and it's probably safe to assume that Oldman had a fairly secular upbringing.

Nowadays, Oldman is a very private person, who eschews media and celebrity whenever he can.[2] But when he was playing Pontius Pilate in a film about Jesus, a reporter got him to talk about his religious views and his views of Jesus. He said:

I wouldn't call myself religious, but I would say that I was spiritual… I'm sure there was an energy and power that came off [of Jesus]. I'm not sure if he could change water into wine or that he could walk on water… but I do believe that a great man, a powerful man, was called Jesus and he walked the Earth.[3]

Oldman goes on to compare him to other great, admired men of history: Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King. But in no way does one get the sense that Oldman considers Jesus divine, or that he deserves an entire religion.

However, when it comes to morals and ethics, Oldman seems to echo the principles of Natural Law ethicists like C.S. Lewis or Augustine:

We're given a code to live our lives by. We don't always follow it but it's still there.[4]

It all, as Oldman himself would probably say, amounts to a thoughtful, personal sort of spirituality.

Old man politics

Again, Oldman is very private. Probably, as a result, quite a bit of rumor surrounds Oldman's political leanings–and all of it seems to say he's a conservative Republican. Perhaps his views are in-line with conservative Republican ideology, but he can't be a Republican. He's British. He said:

I'm still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent – you get contaminated after so long.[5]

There's a pretty good reason people think Oldman leans to the right. After the final cut of his film, The Contender, was released, Oldman objected because he felt it was edited to favor some sort of Democrat, liberal agenda.[6] And his manager, Douglas Urbanski, called the final cut a "Goebbels-like piece of propaganda."[7]

But that's about it. Oldman hasn't come out to endorse any candidate or lent his opinion on any particular issues.