Who is Gary Oldman‘s harshest film critic? Gary Oldman, it seems.
The Oscar winner appeared on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast and admitted that his portrayal of the wizard and Harry Potter’s godfather Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise is “mediocre.” The 65-year-old actor said when fans ask him for an autograph that role’s what they usually bring up. But to everyone’s surprise, Oldman has now offered a harsh assessment of that performance.
“I think my work is mediocre in it,” he said. “No, I do. Maybe if I had read the books like Alan [Rickman], if I got ahead of the curve, if I had known what’s coming, I honestly think I would’ve played it differently. Yeah. I mean, that’s just my own … my wife, says, you know, don’t be ridiculous.”
And the harsh critique is not limited to Sirius Black. Oldman doubled down and said that, when it comes to his illustrious acting career, he’d “put it all on the fire and burn it and do it all again.”
From playing Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK and Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to deftly portraying Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour — for which he won an Oscar and Golden Globe — Oldman says beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
In other words, calling his performances great is subjective.
“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,” said Oldman, who also had a memorable cameo on Friends. “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 love 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 further explained, “And you also have that thing of you think you’re maybe communicating something in a scene and then you see it and then you go, ‘Oh, I wasn’t quite doing that’ or ‘I thought I was doing something different to that.’ So, it’s nitpicking your own work, which is healthy. As long as it doesn’t debilitate you. And old work is old work.”
Oldman, whose storied career also includes playing Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and twice more in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, first appeared in the Harry Potter franchise in 2004’s The Prisoner of Azkaban. He reprised his role in The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix and The Deathly Hallows, Part 2.
Two years ago, during the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary HBO special, Oldman and many of his costars — including Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson — returned to the Warner Bros. studios in Leavesden, England (where all eight of the Harry Potter movies were filmed), and he looked back fondly at the memories he created playing the iconic role.
“It was a long time ago, and yet, it’s all just incredibly familiar. All the memories of working here come flooding back. It was like it was last week… It is a weird experience because you met them as kids and now some of them are married and they’ve got kids of their own. My memory of them is locked – it’s sort of locked in. Obviously, they’ve grown up,” he said. “The great thing about the Potter experience was that a lot of kids couldn’t see the type of movies that I made. And then my fanbase was then suddenly, it shifted from like four years old and up. So a whole new kind of fanbase opened up for you.”
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