Gary Oldman offers Dawn of the Planet of the Apes details

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Who doesn't love Gary Oldman? The guy can act circles around 99% of his peers and has been a longtime favorite of many movie buffs. You can see Oldman chewing the scenery in this weeks ROBOCOP (which The Arrow says is actually worth giving a shot in his review HERE) but it's his work in the upcoming DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES that has a lot of us intrigued.

Oldman recently spoke with MTV News about his work on the sequel to RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, and what fans can expect from his character and his story. The details he revealed go beyond what was teased in the first DAWN trailer so be warned that this could be a bit SPOILERISH so don't read any further if you're interested in going in to check out the new flick blind.

According to what the actor told MTV, Oldman plays "the designated leader" of a community of humans "who were lucky enough to survive the flu, the disease and ensuing social uprising," following the apocalyptic credits sequence of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." Oldman's character was a police officer before the fall of civilization, and has subsequently been elected to lead over his group of survivors.

The human community, desperate to find power, ventures off to a nearby power station, to see if it's still operational. There, the humans "discover that there's a whole community of apes living there. We believed that they were all completely fire-bottomed and wiped out."

They're not wiped out yet, but that might change when Oldman finds out about the apes. Says the actor about his character…

"There's only one answer for him: Wipe them out."

Oldman justifies the character's inclination toward violence because "he's experienced great loss, personally." Indeed, he views the character as "a sort of hero of the piece." Oldman credits the ability to relate to not just his character, but the rest of the DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES cast, to director Matt Reeves' interest in finding the humanity in the film's grand scale. Oldman shares…

"He wanted to make it more of a human story. He wanted to explore what had happened, and keep it more focused on the human side of it, before the story becomes the 'Planet of the Apes' as we know it from the original."

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES will be hitting theaters later this year on July 11 with Andy Serkis, Keri Russell, Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Judy Greer, and Jocko Sims starring.