Warner Bros.
Now that he’s had a chance to reflect, Academy Award-winning actor Gary Oldman isn’t all that crazy about his performance as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise.
During a recent interview, Oldman — who made headlines earlier this month for saying that his roles in Harry Potter and The Dark Knight trilogy “saved” his career — revealed that he know believes his portrayal of Black, Potter’s uncle, is “mediocre.”
“I think my work is mediocre in it,” Oldman said during a recent interview on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast. “No, I do. 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.”
Truthfully, he’s right. Sort of. The real issue when it comes to his performance is its consistency. In Prisoner of Azkaban, despite his innocence, he ultimately comes across as a raving lunatic.
Two movies later, however, in Order of the Phoenix, he’s almost serenely paternal. While he plays both of these personalities perfectly well, as you’d come to expect with a Gary Oldman character, it’s the lack of connective tissue between the two that’s the ultimate problem.
And Oldman’s comments seem to be aware of that, given that he hints at “knowing what’s coming”, i.e., SPOILER ALERT, looking ahead to what the character would go through, both in terms of his own character arc, his relationship with Harry, and his eventual death.