Gary Oldman is grateful that Harry Potter and Dark Knight gave him a lot of money for little work

We tend to think of Gary Oldman as a serious actor, one who brings a bit of prestige to all of his roles and who loves to put on a bunch of prosthetics or just gain weight if a part demands it (in order to make it visually obvious how serious he is), but also if you ask the average person to name a Gary Oldman movie, they’ll almost certainly say one of the Harry Potter movies or one of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies—or, if they’re a real maniac, they’ll say The Fifth Element. And Oldman has no issues with that… in fact, he seems enormously grateful for what the Harry Potter and Batman movies did for both his career and his personal life.

Oldman appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show recently and talked about how he “woke up divorced” at 42 and with sole custody of his sons (Oldman had been accused of abuse by ex-wife Donya Fiorentino 20 years ago, but he was cleared of all charges and grated sole custody of the couple’s children after an investigation), right at a time when a lot of movies were being filmed in various disparate locations around the world. Oldman says he had to turn down a lot of roles simply because he couldn’t travel that much. But “thank god for Harry Potter,” he says, because that franchise and Nolan’s Batman movies allowed him to “do the least amount of work for the most of money” and then still have time to be with his kids.

Ah, doing the least work for the most money. That’s the dream! And that’s without considering the fact that he was in those big franchises and still comes across like a serious actor who does serious things. He can show up for five minutes in Oppenheimer and nobody’s like “wait, why is Sirius Black here?” because we think of him as “Gary Oldman, real actor” and not “the guy from those franchise movies.”