“I may have painted it in a different colour”: the character Gary Oldman feels he let down
Whether it’s an intense character-driven drama or an expensive blockbuster, Gary Oldman can always be leaned on to make his performance a memorable one, regardless of how much screen time he ends up with.
Since the late 1970s, he’s set about becoming one of the finest and most versatile actors of his generation, and it’s hardly a stretch to call him one of the United Kingdom’s greatest ever. He’s got the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ to prove it, but what makes Oldman so good is that there’s no role he can’t play convincingly.
From effects-heavy fantasy epics and comic book adaptations to biographical dramas, crime thrillers, romances, and period pieces, the star has been adding new strings to his bow for decades, to the point that his contemporaries and colleagues now laud him as one of the very best in the business.
Even when he openly admitted he boarded both the Harry Potter franchise and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy because they paid him the most amount of money for the least amount of work so that he had the time to focus on his family life, he could never be accused of phoning in the parts of either Sirius Black or Jim Gordon.
However, Oldman regrets that he wasn’t privy to where his character arc was heading in the aforementioned Potter saga. J.K. Rowling informed Alan Rickman very early on what the future had in store for Severus Snape, which allowed him to pitch his performance as such.
“There was such secrecy that was shrouded around the novels, they were under lock and key,” he said, per IndieWire. “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 colour.”
When he signed on to play Daniel Radcliffe’s on-screen character, the character had only appeared in one book in a supporting capacity where his true motivations weren’t revealed until the end. “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,” he clarified. “That’s what I meant, not to be rude to any of the people out there who like that film.”
He still ended up as a firm fan favourite, even if his tenure ended quicker than many fans of the series were expecting when Sirius was shuffled off his mortal coil in the fifth instalment, Order of the Phoenix, with his biggest contribution to predecessor Goblet of Fire coming when he was digitally imposed onto a fireplace. It’s not the stuff of awards season, then, but Oldman fully committed to the material nonetheless.
