As Gary Oldman notes in a call to the Georgia Straight from New York, we see at least one character in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy “getting knocked about a bit”. But for the most part, the tension in Tomas Alfredson’s magnificent adaptation of John le Carré’s Cold War masterpiece—in which Oldman’s retired spook George Smiley is tasked with hunting down a Soviet mole at the heart of the “Circus”, or MI6—is derived from the silences, double-edged exchanges, and quiet paranoia of the milieu it observes.

And with Oldman inhabiting the role so completely, it takes a moment to adjust to the cockney accent on the other end of the line, speaking with a faint whiff of nostalgia about “grey, foggy, cold London in the ’70s, back when all I was thinking about was football, girls, and David Bowie”. As per the famed Alec Guinness version of the character from the 1979 TV miniseries, Oldman’s Smiley is slightly upper-crust, colourless at times to the point of invisibility, and more of a fearsomely intelligent bureaucrat than a James Bond.

But he exudes danger nonetheless. “John le Carré told me,” Oldman says, “ ‘We never tortured anyone. That’s just not what we did.’ These were people who were recruited from Oxford and Cambridge by their tutors who had fought in the war. They came from a certain class.”

They also seemed to come from a slightly exotic crowd of literary types. Le Carré himself was an intelligence agent, as were Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, and Dennis Wheatley. As it happens, Oldman’s take on Smiley is distantly related to another British author-turned-spy. “Tomas [Alfredson] sent me a picture of Graham Greene,” he reveals, “I think it was from the ’50s, looking very dapper. He said, ‘What do you think?’ I took it from there.”

As critics have noted, Oldman’s mesmerizing performance might be a career best, while Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, as the saying goes, is the kind of film you can’t put down. Why do we love spy movies so much anyway? “Well, they’re like us,” Oldman muses. “We love finding out people’s secrets. We love to uncover things about other people; we’re all Googling each other. We like to look at pictures of people taken through a long lens, don’t we? We’re fascinated with it.”

Indeed we are, and speaking of uncovering secrets, it would be remiss in this instance to not ask the man about one of the key roles of his career. We know considerably more about Lee Harvey Oswald now than we did when Oliver Stone first handed Oldman the script for JFK in the early ’90s. In lieu of that, the actor was asked to gather his own intelligence.

“There was very little Oswald on the page,” Oldman says. “Basically, Oliver gave me some money and some names and said, ‘Go and find out who Lee Harvey Oswald is.’ And so I went and met somebody who had known him, and then another. But you can’t ever really know the truth, can you?”

Maybe, but try telling that to George Smiley.

Watch the trailer for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.