Gary Oldman was Sirius-ly unimpressed with his own Harry Potter performances

We have to imagine it would be difficult to be judged by Gary Oldman—That voice! That glower! That endless series of accents and prosthetics! Which is why we’re glad today that we are not, in fact, Gary Oldman. Who went in for a bit of the ol’ self-judgment on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast recently, in which he asserted, with total sincerity, that he thinks his performances in the Harry Potter movies were “mediocre.”

“I think my work is mediocre in it,” Oldman bluntly says in the interview, provoking a “Gary!” from the ever-affable Horowitz. (Who was interviewing the actor in front of an audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York.) Referencing his old friend Alan Rickman (who was a tad more invested in the material, including famously being one of the only people, besides J.K. Rowling, to know a few of the franchises’ bigger secrets before the books finished publishing), Oldman asserted that, “Maybe if I had read the books, like Alan… If I had gotten ahead of the curve a bit—if I had known what’s coming—I honestly would have played it different.”

Oldman was careful to keep his focus on himself, not the material; he’s said on more than one occasion (including a recent interview with Drew Barrymore), that, from a monetary/free-time point of view, the movies were extremely good jobs. (Ditto his other big franchise role from the era, in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies; the big connection between the two being that they a) paid a lot and b) didn’t involve having to travel too far from his kids to make them.) He did express a bit of irritation with the production of the movies while talking to Horowitz, noting that the bit in Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, where he had to lay down motionless next to a frozen lake for an entire week, was the least pleasant thing he’d done in his entire career.