Sir Gary Oldman: “there’s something to be said for driving an older car”

Sir Gary Oldman likes old cars. Specifically, old, yellow, dented Japanese hatchbacks that have cultivated new organic forms from five years of wilful, glorious on-screen neglect.

“There’s things in there now from when we began five years ago,” Sir Gary Oldman tells TopGear.com about the Honda Civic his character drives in Slow Horses. “There are mushrooms growing in there.”

When we inform Sir Gary that a mouldy, now likely sentient Jaffa Cake from season one bid him a hello, he laughs out loud. “I really enjoyed driving it,” he says, fondly.

Photography: Jonny Fleetwood

We’re sat with the freshly knighted Hollywood superstar and acting powerhouse as Slow Horses kicks off its fifth season. If you haven’t watched it, stop everything and do so right now because it’s brilliant, with Sir Gary chewing on the role of a lifetime as greasy, brilliant MI5 agent Jackson Lamb, in charge of his beloved ‘losers’ at the fictional Slough House.

If you have seen it, you’ll need no introduction to the shabby, decaying majesty of Y889 PDB.

“The most I drove it was in season one, and it wasn’t on a low loader, so the camera was either in front of us, or following us. It was nice to be in a scene and actually physically drive the car.

“I remember the shift was pretty smooth. It’s practical. And it’s… yellow.”

TopGear.com can attest to the smoothness of the shift… and the yellowness. “Did you have fun driving it?” he asks us after TG’s exclusive road test around London. Yes, we did, because there’s something wonderfully liberating about driving an old rotter. “Yeah,” he laughs.

Had his fair share of them, too. His first car was a Morris Minor “with a starting handle”, followed by a Ford Fiesta, and then an old Suzuki Jimny “that was draughty, noisy” and a bit terrifying. “I thought if I take a corner too sharply, this is gonna go over,” he says. “It was like a tin box with wheels.”

He then graduated to a big boy second-hand Rover SD1. “The real old ones with big leather seats, a big steering wheel,” he remembers, “and you’d need at least 100ft to stop. It was like sitting in an armchair. It was racing car green, and I bought it from one of my oldest friends.

“It was forever breaking down. And then I just enjoyed a series of rentals.” TopGear.com politely informs Sir Gary that rental cars are indeed the fastest cars on planet earth. Another big laugh. “Yeah! I occasionally forgot where I parked them too.”

He then got into Range Rovers, but not new ones – ‘hand-me-downs’ from his closest friend, who’d discovered the ‘self-destruct mechanism’ that kicked in from 50-odd thousand miles. “Yeah, they build that in,” he laughs. “They’re beautiful cars, very seductive.”

Also seductive was his old 1955 cherry red Ford Thunderbird. “V8, three gears, very affordable. I think it was under $20k. Pretty solid, and it had the overdrive that’s like a special effect. A fun thing,” he says. “I particularly love the fins, you know?”

Is he a fan of older car design, then? “I find now, everything is very generic. Everything looks the same. When you look at a Thunderbird, or a 550 Spyder, or even a Pontiac or Impala, they have soul and a real character to them. Those designers had a sort of ‘let’s run with it’ attitude. Very Jetsons.”

His old silver Porsche 911 S however, less ‘run with it’, more ‘get me out of it’. “It gave me ball-ache,” he says, with a stern grimace.

“Let’s say you’re going from LA to Palm Springs, you’re doing that journey, and it was like my prostate was… I don’t know what it was about that car but…”

Suffice to say, he rid himself of that prostate-botherer and got himself into a Porsche Cayenne. “Very, very comfortable,” he explains, “so that’s the mainstay.”

That, and his Chuck Beck 550 Spyder. “It’s a replica, mainly fibreglass. I debadged it because it’s not the real thing,” he says. “Sorry, I’m not gonna go around pretending. I spent a little money on it, had it resprayed. It’s got a VW flat-four, very clunky, very mechanical.

“You understand when you drive it why James Dean did not stand a hope in hell of walking away from it,” he adds, sombrely. “But it’s a nice car to take out, pootle around in. Very cool.”

There’s also the small matter of his Runge RS – a hand-built aluminium (“aloo-mi-num”) gullwing-doored lightweight he bought for himself as a 65th birthday present. “I was looking through a magazine and there was an article about Chris Runge and a picture of this car. And I was just so taken with it.”

And in good news, he’s actually taken it out on track near where he lives in California. “It’s oversteery,” he says, “but it’s not scary. You’re focused. You’re really driving the car. It could get away from you if you know what I mean. You do have to be on it. But you really feel the machine.”

That didn’t scare him, but the BMWs they had on hand as track guides really did. “You just touch the accelerator and you’re going from 20mph to over 100mph [clicks fingers] like that, and then you’re coming up to a bend and you’re thinking ‘holy s***’. I think it’s too much.”

Has he done much stunt driving on camera? “I was in the Tumbler [in Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy], where I pretended to drive it. But I’ve done a bit. I do enjoy it. It’s tricky when I’ve been asked to come in a little heavy on the gas, and then you’ve got to pull up and hit a mark.”

What then, does Sir Gary think makes a good movie car chase? We bring up Bullitt as the gold standard. “For me it still holds up as one of the great car chases because a great deal of it is driving. It’s live. It’s in camera.

“And this is one of the things that Nolan does. He tries to use very little CG. The whole plane thing in The Dark Knight Rises with the guys hanging onto the plane… I mean it was real.

“We’ve got to a place now with AI and CG where it’s obviously very good, but there’s no peril. An audience can sense that. A lot of the Fast and Furious stuff, you just know the camera could not possibly be in the position it’s in. “What makes a good car chase is the real deal.”

Saying that, he’s allowed some automotive exuberance in Slow Horses. “I got to drive a black cab in season four. That was fun.

“There’s something to be said for driving an older car, or a car that isn’t yours!”