On Wednesday at the Cannes press conference for Parthenope, actor Gary Oldman was asked about throwing his performance as Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban under the bus.
Toward the end of last year, Oldman told Happy Sad Confused podcast host Josh Horowitz that he thought his work as Black was “mediocre.”
The Oscar winner said at the time, “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.”
Oldman had a word for Potter fans today: He means no harm.
Oldman said he didn’t mean 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 said. “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.”
Oldman added, “There was such secrecy that was shrouded around the novels, they were under lock and key. And had I known from the very beginning, if I had read the five books and I had seen the arc of the character, I might have approached it differently. I may have looked at it differently and painted in a different color. So when I started Harry Potter, all I had was the book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and that one representation of that man. One book in the library of Sirius Black. And that’s kind of what I meant by it. It’s not me looking at the movie and saying it’s a terrible film or I’m terrible, I just wish it had been under different circumstances. That’s what I meant, not to be rude to any of the people out there who like that film.”
Oldman plays the author John Cheever in Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope here at the Cannes Film Festival. The pic received a nine-minute standing ovation at its world premiere last night.
