Harry Potter star Gary Oldman slams his ‘mediocre’ performance in hit film series

Oscar-winner Gary Oldman has delivered a scathing critique of his role in the franchise. Photo / Supplied

Gary Oldman is reflecting on his time filming the Harry Potter film series.

Oldman, who portrayed Potter’s godfather Sirius Black in four of the franchise’s eight films, looked back on his experience working on the beloved series in a new interview and confessed, “I think my work is mediocre in it.”

Gary Oldman as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies. Photo / Supplied

Josh Horowitz sat down with the actor for the Happy Sad Confused podcast and when he scolded him for the critique, Oldman doubled down on the claim, according to Fox News.

“No, I do,” he said. “Maybe if I had read the books like [co-star] Alan [Rickman] … if I’d got ahead of the curve a bit, I would have played … if I’d have known what’s coming, I honestly think I would have played it differently.”

Elsewhere in the interview, late Harry Potter actor Rickman came up in conversation. Rickman, who portrayed Professor Severus Snap across the eight movies, was the only actor from the franchise who had been told early on of his character’s fate by author J.K. Rowling.

Oldman’s performance in the Harry Potter films isn’t the only one he’s not fond of.

Gary Oldman, Rosalind Eleazae and Dustin Demri-Burns in Slow Horses, streaming on Apple TV+.

“Tons of it,” he said of his past work in movies. “I’d put it all on a fire and burn it and do it all again.”

When questioned about his role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he said he’s “not crazy about it.”

He added, “It’s like anything. If I sat and watched myself in something and said, ‘My god, I’m amazing,’ right, that would be a very sad day, because you want to make the next thing better … and 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 loved you in that movie’ and I’m thinking, ‘I’m terrible in that movie, what are they talking about?’ It’s not that. They’re seeing something else.”

He went on to reveal that he thinks that level of “nitpicking” over your own work can be “healthy,” but “you can’t let it debilitate you.”

Gary Oldman aiming gun at Harrison Ford in a scene from the film 'Air Force One', 1997. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)

Oldman shared that while he can be critical of his past work, he doesn’t beat himself up over it.

During the interview, Oldman looked back on a moment during the filming of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, revealing that it was “the most difficult thing” he’s ever done in his career on the screen.

“I had to lie by the lake, there was like this frozen lake, and I’m sort of dead, and the soul is leaving my body,” he recounted.

“It was just me laying down, but Harry Potter, they would shoot … it took forever,” he said. “It was slow. You’d be on a scene for a week, we normally could shoot this in two days. But anyway, I was on that … what they did was build this lake inside this studio and they cooled it down and they froze this lake, and I had to just lie there for a week, day in, day out, doing nothing.”

He remembered complaining during the scene that he was getting cold and said a crew member gave him a hot water bottle to put underneath him. A couple of days later, the actor received a pillow to put under his neck when it began to ache.

He giggled, “The hardest thing I had to do was lie next to a frozen lake.”