Patrick Sawer
·2 min read
It seems a fittingly rock and roll way to sign off for the last time, with an irritated expletive.
Gary Oldman has revealed that his close friend David Bowie’s last words to him were “f--- off”.
The actor didn’t take it personally. Bowie was expressing his irritation with technology at the time.
Oldman recalled how he and Bowie would have a regular Sunday catch-up on Skype in the run-up to his death from liver cancer in 2016.
During what would be their last conversation, Bowie became annoyed at not being able to disconnect the call.
Oldman, the star of Slow Horses, said: “We used to Skype on Sunday mornings and just catch up and chat and what have you.
“And the last thing he ever said to me was, and it’s really actually, so wonderfully, David. We were Skyping and you know when you want to disconnect with someone, sometimes you try and disconnect and you can’t and they keep coming back.
“So he’s pressing the button and he said, ‘alright, talk to you next week’ or whatever.
“And he went, ‘go away, goaway’. And he pressed the button and he went ‘f--- off’.”
Oldman revealed that Bowie maintained his acerbic sense of humour in the months leading to his death just two days after the release of his 26th and final studio album, Blackstar, which coincided with his 69th birthday.
“Let me just say first he handled the cancer, so with such dignity and grace and humor. When he told me about it, he wrote me an email and he said: ‘I’ve got some good news, I’ve got some bad news’,” said Oldman. “He wrote: ‘the bad news is I’ve got the big C’.
“And underneath he wrote: ‘the good news is I got my cheekbones back’, which I thought was just really dark and really sweet and funny of him.”
Oldman, whose acting career includes portraying both Winston Churchill and Sid Vicious, said he had been in awe of Bowie as one of rock’s greatest performers before and after meeting him backstage at a play.
Speaking on CBS’s The Drew Barrymore Show, he recalled one holiday on his yacht near Mustique.
“We were going off the boat to go into town for dinner and I walked through, down the boat and he was sitting in the living room of the boat in shorts, no shoes, socks, T-shirt, strumming the guitar, singing Space Oddity,” he said. “And he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m just messing about.’
“And it was really the first time that I went, ‘you’re David Bowie’.”
