-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.