Gary Oldman Says His Performance in ‘Harry Potter’ Was “Mediocre” – The Hollywood Reporter

Gary Oldman is opening up about why he judges his past performances so harshly, including his portrayal of Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise.

On the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actor told host Josh Horowitz of playing the framed wizard: “I think my work is mediocre in it.”

Oldman suggested that he may have portrayed Sirius Black differently or better if he had any idea of what was coming next in J.K. Rowling’s future books, like his co-star Alan Rickman, who played Professor Snape, did.

“Maybe if I had read the books like Alan, if I had got ahead of the curve, if I had known what’s coming, I honestly think I would have played it differently,” the Bram Stoker’s Dracula actor explained.

But his role in the Harry Potter films isn’t the only performance he has critiqued. Oldman admitted that it’s difficult for him not to find faults in his own work.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” he said. “It’s like anything, I think if I sat and watched myself in something and said, ‘My God, I’m amazing,’ that would be a very sad day, because you want to make the next thing better.”

Oldman continued, “It’s so subjective. It’s such a personal thing that you’re looking at that other people are not seeing. … It’s not to disrespect someone who says to me, ‘Oh, I really love you in that movie,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I’m terrible in that movie. What are they talking about?’ It’s not that. It’s [that] they’re seeing something else.”

The actor initially made his debut as Sirius Black in 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He then reprised his role in two more installments before his character was killed in 2007’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. 

Elsewhere in the interview with Horowitz, Oldman also quipped that he was killed off too early, saying, “I’m still upset about that.”

“We [cast] were all taking bets, you know, it’s Hagrid, and I was there going, no, no, no, maybe it’s Ron,” he added. “And then you kind of open the script and you go, it’s me. I’m out of here.”

Earlier this month, Oldman said on The Drew Barrymore Show that his roles in Harry Potter and The Dark Knight movies “saved” him when he became a single father. The actor played Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy.

“At 42 years old, I woke up, you know, sort of divorced and I had custody of these boys,” he said at the time. “That, in itself, was … that was hard because there was a shift in the industry where a lot of productions were … in Hungary, Budapest, Prague, Australia, you know, all of these places. So, I turned down a lot of work.”

The actor continued, “Thank God for Harry Potter. I tell you, the two — Batman and Harry Potter — really, they saved me, because it meant that I could do the least amount of work for the most amount of money and then be home with the kids.”