Gary Oldman Doesn’t Think The ‘Harry Potter’ Films Were His Finest Hours, Calling His Take On Sirius Black ‘Mediocre’

Like most British actors, Gary Oldman scored a plum role in the Harry Potter-verse. He played Sirius Black, the notorious wizard who turns out to actually be one of the goodies. When he started, with the 2004 threequel Prisoner of Azkaban, Oldman was one of Hollywood’s go-to villainous hams, and playing Sirius gave him a chance to show both his darker and warmer sides. Someone who wasn’t impressed with his Harry Potter work Gary Oldman.

“I think my work is mediocre in it,” the Oscar-winning thespian said during an appearance on the podcast Happy Sad Confused, per Entertainment Weekly. He even confessed one of his actorly failings. “Maybe if I had read the books like Alan [Rickman], if I had got ahead of the curve, if I had known what’s coming, I honestly think I would have played it differently.”

Perhaps Oldman didn’t mean to single out his work as Sirius Black. After all, he’s always hard on himself, never content , which is what keeps him going.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Oldman explained. “It’s like anything, 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.”

In other words, you don’t have to be too hard on Oldman’s three Harry Potter turns (four if you count the cameo in Deathly Hallows Part II), because you’re not Gary Oldman. Indeed, one could argue his work there helped him transition into nicer roles, like the earnest do-gooder Commissioner Gordon in the Christopher Nolan Batmans. Today he can mix it up, playing nice guys, troubled guys like in Mank, or hissable scoundrels like Oppenheimer’s Harry Truman.

You can watch Oldman’s entire Happy Sad Confused appearance in the video below.