When he’s not hamming it up in Hollywood fare or giving texture to tentpole franchises, Gary Oldman is often unrecognizable. His most iconic roles—Lee Harvey Oswald, Count Dracula, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg—are the ones in which you often forget it’s him you’re watching. That will most certainly be the case with The Darkest Hour, wherein he plays Winston Churchill.

Atonement’s Joe Wright helmed the story, which chronicles Churchill’s decision to, on the eve of World War II, buckle to Nazi Germany or stand up for the rights of an entire nation. The story has resonance, but a script by The Theory of Everything’s Anthony McCarten might nudge this thing into boilerplate awards fodder; still, however, Oldman’s performance is bound to be a stunner.

(Read: Revisiting the Retro-Futurist Dreams and Nightmares of The Fifth Element)

The trailer alone has us giving the actor a standing ovation, and it’s not as if he doesn’t deserve it. Oldman’s only Oscar nomination to date came for his role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy just a few years ago (he didn’t win).

The Darkest Hour also stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Stephen Dillane, and Ben Mendelsohn, and is due to open in select cities on November 22nd. Watch the trailer above.