(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
In the 1990s, Gary Oldman became Hollywood’s premier go-to bad guy. He played the Prince of Darkness, Dracula; menaced Harrison Ford’s ass-kicking president in Air Force One; chewed the scenery as an unhinged DEA agent in Léon: The Professional; and adopted a truly bizarre hairdo as an industrialist/weapons designer who leads a team of alien mercenaries in The Fifth Element.
Naturally, as a consequence of playing so many despicable ne’er-do-wells, Oldman became no stranger to his characters’ biting the dust. Every action movie fan remembers Ford growling, “Get off my plane!” as he kicks Oldman out of the presidential plane’s cargo hold, breaking his neck in the process. Similarly, the image of DEA agent Norman Stansfield being blown up by a string of grenades lives long in the memory.
However, according to Oldman, neither of these deaths is his favourite on-screen demise. Instead, that honour goes to Drexl Spivey’s wince-inducing termination in Tony Scott’s crime classic True Romance. In that movie, famously written by a young Quentin Tarantino, Oldman gave one of his most beloved, and most demented, performances as a white drug dealer with gold teeth, a milky eye, and dreadlocks. Drexl had a problematic habit of speaking with a faux-Black patois and was downright malevolent from almost the second he appeared on-screen.
Amusingly, Tarantino admitted that he wrote Drexl for himself to play, which is an insane thing to picture. However, when Oldman was hired, he took the biggest of big swings to play the off-the-wall character, and stood the chance of falling flat on his face. His commitment to the bit was undeniably entertaining, though, and for the brief period he’s in the film, Drexl adds a real frisson of unpredictability and danger. Then, he gets killed off in truly spectacular fashion.
Amusingly, Scott and Oldman admitted in a 2008 Maxim retrospective that Oldman’s mother was on-set to watch her son’s number one screen death. “Gary would bring his 70-year-old mum to the set,” Scott chuckled. “After a take, he’d go, ‘Mum, what do you think?’ She’d say, ‘It’s good,’ and he’d go, ‘What the fuck do you know? It’s terrible.’”
Oldman added with a mischievous glint in his eye, “She’s seen it all. God bless her.”
Still, it’s likely that even the “been there, done that” Mrs Oldman was taken aback by the sheer brutality of her son’s death in True Romance. However, if she did feel shocked or horrified by witnessing him getting a shotgun blast to the groin, followed by one straight to the dome, she refused to let it show. “His mum was also there for the scene where Drexl’s dick gets blown off,” Scott matter-of-factly remembered. “She said, ‘Yeah, I thought that was really good.’”
As for Oldman, he loved Drexl’s bloody send-off precisely because it was so outlandish and violent. In fact, it was even more explicit in the movie’s initial edit, but Scott was forced to tone it down for the theatrical cut. “The gun fired blanks, but there was still a flare and powder coming out of the barrel,” Oldman reminisced. “I wore a metal cup.”
After pondering his extensive list of deaths, though, including his iconic execution in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oldman concluded that Drexl was a cut above the rest. “I’ve died in a lot of movies, but to have my dick blown off and then get shot in the face with my eyes open, that’s up there,” he grinned. “That beats a stake through the heart!”
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