Gary Oldman clarifies comments about his “mediocre” Harry Potter performance as Sirius Black

Gary Oldman has followed up on his comments that he feels his performance in the Harry Potter films was “mediocre”.

In December, the actor spoke about how he felt about his performance as Sirius Black in the franchise, which began with 2004’s Prisoner of Azkaban and wound up with 2007’s Order of the Phoenix (except for a cameo in the final film in 2011).

“I think my work is mediocre in it,” he told 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.”

“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s like anything, 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.”

But now, during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, he has fielded questions on the subject and clarified his sentiments, stressing that he didn’t want to “disparage anyone out there who are fans of Harry Potter and the films, and the character who I think is much beloved”.

“What I meant by that is, as any artist or any actor or painter, you are always hypercritical of your own work,” he continued (via Variety). “If you’re not, and you’re satisfied with what you’re doing, that would be death to me. If I watched a performance of myself and thought, ‘My God, I’m fantastic in this,’ that would be a sad day.”

Just weeks before his original comments, Oldman also took time to explain how the Potter films, as well as the Dark Knight trilogy, “saved” him when he became a single father.

“At 42 years old, I woke up divorced and I had custody of these boys,” he says. “So that was hard because there was a shift in the industry where a lot of productions were being [filmed in], it was Hungary, Budapest, Prague, Australia, you know, all of these places.”

“Thank God for Harry Potter,” Oldman added. “I tell you, the two – Batman and Harry Potter – really they saved me, because it meant that I could do the least amount of work for the most amount of money and then be home with the kids.”

Oldman is at Cannes supporting his new film Parthenope, directed by Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, This Must Be The Place).