Gary Oldman’s manager has claimed that the actor was barred from reprising his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy role by the sons of the book’s author John le Carré’.

The actor played the lead role of veteran agent George Smiley in the 2011 film adaptation of 1974 novel, which follows Smiley as he is forced out of retirement to help the British secret service unmask a Soviet spy within their ranks.

Oldman had wanted to reprise the role for an adaptation of Smiley’s People, the third and final book in the author’s spy trilogy, but his manager Douglas Urbanski said it didn’t get off the ground due to a “rights issue”.

“That’s an odd story. I’ll never know the mystery,” Urbanski told Radio Times. “We loved Tinker and we started to do prep for Gary to do Smiley’s People, and suddenly there was an unexpected rights issue.

“We’ve reached out, including again recently, to le Carré’s sons and – the damnedest thing – they have no interest in Gary playing Smiley again. I don’t know why,.”

[embedded content]

Directed by Tomas Alfredson, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy also starred Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, Stephen Graham and Tom Hardy. It won three Oscars for Best Actor, Best Original Score and Best Adapted Screenplay and landed 12 Bafta nominations, of which it won three.

le Carré died from pneumonia in 2020 and is survived by his two sons, novelist Nick Cornwell and movie producer Stephen Cornwell.

Nick, who is best known by his pen name Nick Harkaway, continued his father’s legacy by writing a new novel based on Smiley called Karla’s Choice, set in the missing decades between le Carré’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

In other news, Oldman recently called out the royal family for not honouring his services to acting.

“I don’t know why. You should ask them. No nod from the royals, but there we are,” he said. “Maybe it’s in my future.”