Gary Oldman revealed on The Graham Norton Show that he would smoke around 12 cigars a day that cost £50 each while filming his latest film, Darkest Hour.

Smoking that many cigars gave him nicotine poisoning and left him in need of a colonoscopy over the Christmas break.



Gary Oldman is notoriously method in his approach to acting, although he might have taken it a bit too far playing Winston Churchill in the World War II drama Darkest Hour.

Not only did the 59-year-old actor undergo an unrecognisable physical transformation to play the war-time prime minister, but he also picked up Churchill's unhealthy penchant for smoking cigars during filming.

That might actually be an understatement, seeing as Gary basically admitted on The Graham Norton Show's New Year's Eve special that the cigar budget was more than some of the actors were paid!

"I don't smoke anymore and I got nicotine poisoning," he admitted to his stunned fellow chat show guests. "I was on about twelve [cigars] a day.

"I went through $30,000 of cigars on the set! They're 50 quid a pop, and I would do about 12 of them a day, so I basically had a bad stomach for the three months I was on the [film].

"We had a Christmas break. Everybody went off and decorated their Christmas tree, and went off shopping, and I went to have a colonoscopy! That was my Christmas present."

On top of suffering a sour stomach for weeks on end, Gary also had to undergo endless hours in the makeup chair each day of filming Darkest Hour in order to make himself look like Churchill.

"I would say it's a benchmark in prosthetic make-up," the actor said. "The whole thing took four hours."

At the end of the day, the hours of prep and months of physical pain were probably worth it, if only for this amazing video of Gary Oldman channeling the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, for a Churchill dance-off:

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