Gary Oldman's 10 Greatest Movie Performances - Ranked
3. The Firm - Clive Bissell
The football hooligan film had a second life in the early 2000s, but they really needn’t have bothered, because 1989 TV movie The Firm covered the topic so perfectly. A large part of its immense success is down to a fiery turn from its lead - Charlie Hunnam, it’s fair to say, is no Gary Oldman.
As Clive Bissell, Oldman is tasked with playing two characters. Most of the time, Clive is a family man with a respectable job, a loving wife and a young son. Once a week, though, he becomes Bex, the revered leader of West Ham’s notorious Inter City Crew.
Oldman manages to sell the notion that these disparate sides of his personality are equally important to Clive that, no matter how much his wife pleads, he simply can’t walk away from the buzz he gets from the violence, the responsibility he feels towards his crew of disaffected young men.
The Firm is commendably unglamorous in its depictions of violence, but neither does it preach, assuming the audience is smart enough to be repulsed without a message needing to be tacked on. Oldman’s layered performance allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions as to just how tragic (or loathsome) a figure Clive may or may not be.