He’s one of the most celebrated actors of the past few decades, but even Gary Oldman has had struggles over the years – including over his own perception of his work.
Earlier in the year, Oldman made headlines appearing on “The Drew Barrymore Show” saying his work as Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” franchise and Jim Gordon in the “Dark Knight” trilogy ‘saved’ both his career and his personal life at the time.
That said, he doesn’t have much praise for his work on the “Harry Potter” films – dubbing his work on those films as ‘mediocre’.
The actor, who first appeared in 2004’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and continued in the role for two further films, spoke with the Happy Sad Confused podcast and explained:
“I think my work is mediocre in it. 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.”
Part of the reason is Oldman is a harsh judge of his own talent, saying he rarely has praise for himself and he sees that as a good thing:
“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.”
Oldman also revealed that the hardest scene he had to shoot across three “Hary Potter” films wasn’t any big emotional moment, it was the scene where he was lying prone by the lake in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”:
“In one of the Harry Potters, there was like a frozen lake. And I’m sort of dead, and my soul is leaving my body, and I had to just lie there for a week, day in, day out, doing nothing.
Doing nothing, but then you’d have to get, you know, ‘Can someone – I’m getting a, I think my kidneys are really getting a bit cold.’ And then they’d put the little hot water bottle under you, and you’d lie there like that.
And then day three, you go, ‘My neck is killing me,’ and they’d put a little pillow underneath you. Yeah, the hardest thing I had to do was lie next to a frozen lake.”
His roles in both ‘Azkaban’ and “Batman Begins” led to a resurgence in his career, leading to parts in the “Call of Duty” game franchise along with films like “The Book of Eli,” “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”.
