The Oldman Index

I finally got around to watching the excellent 28 Days Later tonight and something about Christopher Eccleston's performance reminded me of this post on Bar Room Philosophy asking people to name a film where Gary Oldman wasn't playing a nutter, with the eventual conclusion being that his appearance as Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead was just about it. It occurred to me that Christopher Eccleston has a large number of nutters in his history, so I checked his IMdB profile and discovered that, while he's not up to Oldman levels of nutterdom, there's a pretty strong streak of it through his career - after all, this is the man who managed to play a rather nutter-esque character in an appearance on Linda Green.

But it made me think - shouldn't there be some kind of measurement of an actor's propensity to play nutters? Call it the Oldman Index, expressed as a percentage of their films they've been nutters in. Oldman himself of course rates a full 100, as I feel we can discount Rosencrantz based on it being a Stoppard play and I think every actor should be allowed to have one role we can ignore in the ranking. On this ranking, I'd say Eccleston should get an Oldman Factor of about 50-60, and someone like Dennis Hopper would probably be somewhere in the mid-90s (off the top of my head, both Hoosiers and True Romance come to mind as films where he's played sane characters, and I'm sure there are others - Easy Rider is debatable) and someone like Tim Robbins is going to have a very low Oldman Factor (for just Arlington Road and maybe Bob Roberts).

I'm not really sure what to do with Oldman Index now I've thought of it - perhaps it could be part of some kind of alternative movie star Top Trumps? As well as their Oldman Factor, there could be categories like degrees of Kevin Bacon, family film avoidance factor, descent of career into embarrassment factor (Dan Aykroyd would probably be the index for this one), scenery chewing ability etc