Giving truth to the old saw that one "just reads Playboy for the articles," it seems like everyone's been talking about actor Gary Oldman's recent interview with the magazine, in which he made some eyebrow-raising remarks about Jewish people, gay folks, and Nancy Pelosi. And, oh yeah, it sounds like he might have been in San Francisco getting it on just as the Loma Prieta quake hit.
When asked about Mel Gibson, Oldman (who was accompanied throughout the interview by his manager and producing partner Douglas Urbanski, who also fills in for Rush Limbaugh) said "I just think political correctness is crap...We’re all fucking hypocrites. That’s what I think about it. The policeman who arrested him has never used the word nigger or that fucking Jew? I’m being brutally honest here. It’s the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy. Or maybe I should strike that and say 'the N word' and 'the F word' though there are two F words now."
"Alec [Baldwin] calling someone an F-A-G in the street while he’s pissed off coming out of his building because they won’t leave him alone. I don’t blame him. So they persecute. Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him—and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, 'That fucking kraut' or 'Fuck those Germans,' whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going, 'Isn’t that shocking?'"
Apparently Oldman realized that he'd also "said the wrong thing," as in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Center and reported on by LAist Tuesday, the actor said, in part, that "Upon reading my comments in print—I see how insensitive they may be, and how they may indeed contribute to the furtherance of a false stereotype."
"I hope you will know that this apology is heartfelt, genuine, and that I have an enormous personal affinity for the Jewish people in general, and those specifically in my life," he wrote. (The ADL, it appears, was not impressed.)
As far as we know, however, Oldman has yet to apologize to San Francisco's own congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, for whom the actor had harsh words as he continued to criticize the concept of "political correctness."
"Well, if I called Nancy Pelosi a cunt—and I’ll go one better, a fucking useless cunt—I can’t really say that," the actor said, though that is exactly what he just did.
"But Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can, and nobody’s going to stop them from working because of it. Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it. He said to Seth MacFarlane this year, 'I thought you were going to do the Oscars again. Instead they got a lesbian.' He can say something like that. Is that more or less offensive than Alec Baldwin saying to someone in the street, 'You fag'? I don’t get it."
Yeah, Gary, it kind of sounds like you don't.
Oldman continued his questionable approach to humor when the now-sober actor recounted one of his earlier-in-life "wild times," the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
"There’s an amusing story about a trip up to San Francisco fueled largely by vodka and timed perfectly to the big 1989 earthquake. We were literally at the epicenter," Oldman said.
According to Wikipedia, the quake, which occurred at 5:04 PM on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, had its epicenter at Santa Cruz County's The Forest Of Nisene Marks State Park. But let's not quibble.
The seismic event that killed 63 people, injured 3,757, and left as many as 12,000 people homeless, apparently also got Oldman off. For, as the actor says, "Afterward it was like, 'Well, was it good for you, darling? Because the earth definitely moved for me.'"
