Gary Oldman says Harry Potter needed more Sirius Black

Gary Oldman played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise, but he says his character didn’t appear in the movies enough.

Gary Oldman played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise, but he recently told IndieWire that he didn’t appear in the movies enough.

“I love, Sirius,” Oldman said. “He wasn’t in it enough. He turned up and then he went through the veil.” After Oldman’s first appearance in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he made a cameo in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and showed up in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where he was killed off. He made another cameo in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, but all in all, not a lot of screen time for the Academy Award-winning actor.

With the upcoming Harry Potter TV series, there’s room for more Sirius Black, and while Oldman isn’t expecting to reprise the role, he would be open to another. “I would bet my money that they will get a whole new cast of people,” Oldman said. “Maybe in a few years, I could do Dumbledore.“

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Although Oldman would have liked more screen time in the movies, he has also been very critical of his performance in them. “I think my work is mediocre in it,” Oldman said last year. “No, I do. Maybe if I had read the books like Alan, 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.“

He later clarified his remarks, saying they weren’t meant to disparage any Harry Potter fans, it’s just that he’s always hypercritical of his own work. He added that had he known the entirety of Sirius’ arc, he might have approached the character differently. “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,” Oldman said. “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.“

Would you have liked to have seen more of Gary Oldman as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movie?