Gary Oldman, who raged against hypocrisy, political correctness and rationalized the offensive rants of actors Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin in a Playboy interview, is getting blowback.
In the interview, published online Monday, Oldman insisted, “we all say those things,” regarding Gibson’s use of racial slurs during his infamous 2006 arrest for drunken driving. Oldman asked rhetorically if the policeman who arrested Oldman ever used those words himself.
Former L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy James Mee, who arrested Gibson, told TMZ, “the N-word is a scary word,” and “I would never even dream of using it. . . . Why would I, as a Jew, do that to other races?”
In the interview, Oldman, 56, said “Mel Gibson is in a town that is run by Jews and he said the wrong thing.”
Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Ant-Defamation League, said in a statment Tuesdaythat the British actor “should know better than to repeat tired anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish control of Hollywood.”
“This notion that he’s defending Mel and Alec is preposterous,” said Oldman’s manager, Douglas Urbanski. “Gary Oldman would not defend hate speech or any divisive speech. The piece lacked a kind of balance on that regard.”
Oldman “finds any kind of bigotry, homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism or sexism unacceptable and disgraceful,” Urbanski said in the statement.
