
When Michael Fassbender accepted the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival last Sunday, he paid tribute to someone who might well have collected the prize himself. “I have been following Gary Oldman’s career since I was 14,” he said. “And I feel very, very humble tonight.”
When I ask Oldman if he might have some tips for the young Fassbender and the Hollywood machine of which he’s been a part for 20 years, his eyes twinkle. “I don’t think he needs any advice from me. I think he’s the bollocks. The real deal. When I heard what he’d said about me, I thought, ‘Here’s back at you kid’.”