While Gary Oldman’s performance as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise is a real stand-out for many fans, the man himself has admitted he’s not one of them.
During a recent interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Oscar winner admitted he thinks his performance in Harry Potter was simply “mediocre”.
There’s a reason for this, apparently, as Gary went on to say that, unlike several of his co-stars, he never actually read the original books, or enquired about his character’s eventual fate, when he first began work on Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban.
“Maybe if I had read the books like Alan [Rickman, who played Professor Snape], if I had got ahead of the curve, if I had known what’s coming, I honestly think I would have played it differently,” he opined.
“We were all taking bets [on which character would die], you know, ‘it’s Hagrid’, and I was there going, ‘no, no, no, maybe it’s Ron’. And then you kind of open the script and you go, ‘it’s me. I’m out of here’.”
Gary’s character was eventually killed off in the fifth Harry Potter film The Order Of The Phoenix, after previously making appearances in The Prisoner Of Azkaban and The Goblet Of Fire.
He later made a brief cameo in the final film, The Deathly Hallows, Part Two.
Later in the interview, the three-time Bafta winner revealed he’s always especially hard on himself after watching back his performances, sharing: “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.”