Veteran actor has touched on his own relationship with aging, as well as his path to sobriety while commenting on the evocative themes in Paolo Sorrentino’s . Sorrentino’s love letter to , follows a physically and intellectually captivating young woman, played by breakout star Celeste Dalla Porta, across decades as the film balances youth, freedom, and yearning against a backdrop of enchanting Neapolitans. At the ‘s press conference for the film, Oldman was asked about his character, an aging American writer called John Cheever.
“If there are any similarities and there are a few between me and Mr Cheever, to connect it directly to the movie...
I have a stepson (in ) who is 16 and I’m sure he longs to be 18 and 21. You’re always wishing when you’re young, you actually wish away your youth to be older,” Oldman said. “There’s a saying, isn’t there, that we have one foot in the past, one foot in the future, and we piss on today.
We are not in the moment.” He touched on his own experience as a young man in the industry. “I’m the happiest I’ve been.
I’m more comfortable now than I was in my skin when I was younger...
There was chaos, pain and a lot of drama in my life when I was younger. It’s no secret that I used to drink and I just celebrated 20 years of sobriety.” (He said to audience applause.
) “Coming into this role, there are things that I instinctively understood. When Paolo said: ‘I want you to play the sad, melancholy, drunken poet,�.