Darkest Hour Interviews with Gary Oldman, Ben Mendelsohn and Joe Wright

The Focus Features and Working Title Films film Darkest Hour will expand wide in theaters on December 22 and we recently got a chance to chat with the cast, including Gary Oldman, who plays Winston Churchill, Ben Mendelsohn, who plays King George IV, and director Joe Wright. You can watch our Darkest Hour interviews in the player below.

The original screenplay is by Anthony McCarten, an Academy Award nominee and BAFTA Award winner as screenwriter of Focus and Working Title’s The Theory of Everything. McCarten produced Darkest Hour with Lisa Bruce and Working Title co-chairs Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, all of whom were Academy Award-nominated as producers of Best Picture Oscar nominee The Theory of Everything. Oldman was a Best Actor Academy Award nominee for Focus and Working Title’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Within days of becoming Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill must face one of his most turbulent and defining trials: exploring a negotiated peace treaty with Nazi Germany, or standing firm to fight for the ideals, liberty and freedom of a nation. As the unstoppable Nazi forces roll across Western Europe and the threat of invasion is imminent, and with an unprepared public, a skeptical King, and his own party plotting against him, Churchill must withstand his darkest hour, rally a nation, and attempt to change the course of world history.

Joining Oldman in the cast are Academy Award nominee John Hurt as Neville Chamberlain, whom Churchill succeeded as Prime Minister; Lily James (“Downton Abbey,” Cinderella) as Churchill’s personal secretary; Golden Globe Award nominee Ben Mendelsohn as King George VI; and Academy Award nominee Kristin Scott Thomas as Churchill’s wife, Clementine.

Wright, a BAFTA Award winner, is making his fourth feature with Working Title and Focus; the director’s previous films with the companies were Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and Anna Karenina, which combined won two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and four BAFTA Awards. He also directed for Focus the hit thriller Hanna, starring Saoirse Ronan.