Batman Begins Star Gary Oldman Reveals Surprising Inspiration for His Jim Gordon in The Dark Knight Trilogy

2005’s Batman Begins was envisioned as a darker, more serious approach to the caped crusader. Director Christopher Nolan‘s Batman reboot about Bruce Wayne’s (Christian Bale) first year fighting crime was based on such seminal comic books as Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, and Dennis O’Neil and Dick Giordano’s “The Man Who Falls” from 1989’s Secret Origins of the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes, in which a young Bruce Wayne fell into a bat-filled cave, witnessed the murder of his parents, and then grew into a man who traveled the world to become what frightened him as a boy: a bat.

For actor Gary Oldman, who played Sergeant Jim Gordon, one of the few good cops in Gotham City, the obvious inspiration was Year One. The four-part origin story introduced a younger, red-haired Lieutenant James Gordon, who relocated to the corruption and crime-infested Gotham City at the same time that Bruce — 18 years after the deaths of Martha and Thomas Wayne — became the Batman.

While Oldman did draw from Year One, he infused another inspiration into his performance as the middle-aged Gordon. In a sitdown with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Oldman revealed the biggest impact on his Jim Gordon: Jet lag.

Batman Begins “went back to the comic books — really going back to [the comics] as Chris wanted to infuse it with the spirit of the comic book, of the original story, and a bit of realism,” Oldman said. Following the campiness of 1997’s Batman & Robin, Oldman said, “Batman, at that point, had gotten to a point that was really ridiculous.”

In Begins, Gordon is “a policeman who is sort of up against it,” Oldman noted of rampant corruption and crime in Gotham. “[His] best efforts can’t corral the chaos. There’s a world weariness to Jim Gordon.”

Oldman recounted living in Los Angeles at the time that the England-based Begins filmed in the UK. “I was a single dad, and I really didn’t want to leave the kids for too long,” he recalled. “We’re shooting in England, and I said to Chris, ‘Would it be okay if I fly in, we’ll shoot, and I’ll fly back?’ … I think I ended up doing 27 round trips on the first Batman.”

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“I’d go home for two days, see the kids, fly back, work three days, go home, be home for three days. I’d fly to London and do one shot, then get on the plane the next morning and come back,” Oldman said. “I’m being somewhat silly, but there’s a sort of world weariness to him. And so I embraced that feeling that you have of when you’re going back and forth and you’ve been on a long flight. I thought, ‘I can actually use this to my advantage.’”

The script, penned by Nolan and David S. Goyer, described the present-day Gordon as 46 years old with “worn eyes.” And while Oldman used his bout with jet lag to play a Gordon who is fatigued by the oppressive nature of Gotham City, his character was there on the page.

“This is the thing when people ask you about doing research or working outside the script. If you’re working with good writing, the psychology of it, the emotion, it’s in the script,” he said. “And it’s a map of the world, it’s a map of you’re world that you’re going to inhabit, whether it’s Dracula or Slow Horses. When you’re working with good writing, it’s in the text. So I don’t always feel such the need to go beyond what is there.”

Oldman reprised his role as Lieutenant and then Commissioner Gordon in 2008’s The Dark Knight and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, and later reunited with Nolan to portray Harry S. Truman in 2023’s Oppenheimer.