(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 14 February 2026 15:15, UK
You’re not ever going to get on with everyone you have to work with.
Someone will always wind you up by microwaving some fish, or by incessantly coughing all day, or by daring to suggest to you that Fred Again is somehow better than the Chemical Brothers, leaving you seething for the rest of the day, which definitely didn’t happen to me once. But the problem with being a Hollywood actor who falls out with a director is that it can threaten to derail a film that costs millions, as Gary Oldman once discovered.
You get the impression that Oldman, while seemingly a perfectly affable guy, is not someone that is going to be ordered around on a movie set, especially given he’s an award-winning director himself, and that if someone were to try to push things through he didn’t agree with they may well find themselves on the receiving end of a Jackson Lamb-style volley of withering invective.
And exactly that kind of situation occurred when Oldman was cast in a 2000 film called The Contender, a political White House drama co-starring Jeff Bridges and Christian Slater, telling the story of a senator attempting to become the first female Vice President, only to have her past dug into by right-wing opposition. So far, so good, you would think. However, the movie was written and directed by a former film critic and army veteran, Rod Lurie, who, to put it mildly, was not one to shy away from conflict.
For several years, Lurie had a talk radio show based around entertainment, where he would do things like invite major film stars on and then have bets with them as to whether they’d win Oscars or not, sometimes resulting in them having to thank him in acceptance speeches, and this is aside from once describing Danny DeVito as a testicle with arms.
Once Lurie moved into directing films, he proved equally forthright, and the problems between him and Oldman on The Contender seem to stem from his Israeli roots and supposed pressure from Jewish names in the industry, who wanted the film to be more left-leaning, as opposed to Oldman, who played a fiercely Republican character in the movie.
After Lurie recut the film at the last minute, shortening it by 15 minutes and adding music, Oldman’s manager Douglas Urbanski said: “If your names are Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, you can’t have a film with a Republican character who is at all sympathetic being released (on the Jewish holiday) Oct. 13th.”
Both Oldman and his manager felt that in the original script, it was his character who was the hero, but that changed after the edit and after suggestions from the distributor Dreamworks. Oldman said of Lurie, “To have a friend and director not go in and fight for you is just deeply, deeply disappointing. . . . I am very hurt by it.”
Despite the back and forth, the film, once released, was still a hit with critics and picked up two Oscar nominations, plus Oldman received a phone call from Dustin Hoffman commending him on his performance. Lurie, though, remained unimpressed and said of the British actor: “Gary is emblematic of what many actors go through: A kind of Stockholm syndrome in which they begin to sympathise with their captors, and in this case, the captors are the characters they play.”