Gary Oldman doesn’t think much of his performance as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films.
In an interview with Josh Horowitz for the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the 65-year-old British actor said that he was “still upset” about being killed off in the series “too early” before being asked how often he gets asked about his performance in those movies. “If they ask me to sign a picture, yeah, that’s the one that comes up the most,” he said. “I think my work is mediocre in it.”
When Horowitz expressed surprise at the admission, Oldman replied, “No, I do.” When asked why he felt that way, he added, “I don’t know. 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. My wife says, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But she often does.”
Oldman, who portrayed Black in four of the films starting with 2004’s The Prisoner of Azkaban, admitted that he’s often highly critical of his past performances. “Tons of it, I’d put it all on a fire and burn it and do it all again,” he said. Horowitz asked him how he would play Count Dracula differently, since he’s been critical of his performance in the 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula multiple times.
“I’m not crazy about it,” he said of his acting in the film. “I think that if I sat and watched myself in something and said, ‘My God, I’m amazing,’ right, that would be a very sad day,” he said. “Because you want to make the next thing better. It’s so subjective, it’s such a personal thing that you’re looking at that not 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, ‘Well I’m terrible in that movie.’ It’s not that, they’re seeing something else.”
