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Some projects will only work for their producers with very specific casting, which was the challenge John le Carré’s TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY faced.

The Cold War spy story, directed by Tomas Alfredson (LET THE RIGHT ONE IN) from Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan’s screenplay, opened in limited release Dec. 9, 2011 via Focus Features. Based on le Carré’s 1974 novel, it was his fifth book revolving around George Smiley.

After an exhaustive 18 month casting quest for the right actor to play Smiley, the producers — including England’s Working Title Films & France’s StudioCanal, which was putting up the $21M budget  — were about to abandon the project. Happily, that’s when producer Tim Bevan (Working Title’s co-chair with producer Eric Fellner) suggested Gary Oldman.

With Oldman’s casting, TINKER became a go project. He was the fifth distinguished actor to bring Smiley to life, following Rupert Davies, in the 1965 movie THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD; James Mason in the 1967 film THE DEADLY AFFAIR (as “Charles Dobbs” not Smiley); Sir Alec Guinness, in the 1979 BBC mini-series version of TINKER & the 1982 BBC mini-series SMILEY’S PEOPLE; and Denholm Elliott in the 1991 TV movie A MURDER OF QUALITY. For Oldman, playing Smiley meant reviving his English accent that had mostly evaporated since he left the U.K. for Hollywood.

Alfredson explained in an interview promoting TINKER why Oldman was the perfect Smiley: “I clearly understood that we shouldn’t look for someone who sort of looked like Alec Guinness…But the complexity of finding the right actor for the part was that…he is described as anyone’s uncle, someone you would immediately forget if you saw him on the street and to have that as a leading part in a big film, it’s a contradiction…It takes a lot of guts to actually go around doing nothing and not reacting, you need a lot of experience to do that and to dare to do that.”

The project began when A-List screenwriter Peter Morgan (FROST/NIXON) submitted a draft to Working Title. Morgan had to exit for personal reasons, but became one of the film’s nine executive producers — a group that includes le Carré, who also has a cameo role in a party scene.

Working Title brought in screenwriters O’Connor & Straughan to succeed Morgan. In July 2009, they hired Swedish filmmaker Alfredson to direct his first English language movie.  

TINKER was a success across the board. After world premiering in September 2011 at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, where it was a critical success, it went on to gross $85.1M worldwide. TINKER later won BAFTAs for Outstanding British Film & Adapted Screenplay and received Oscar noms for Adapted Screenplay, Original Score & lead actor (Oldman).