Gary Oldman calls his 'Harry Potter' performance as Sirius Black 'mediocre'

Gary Oldman may just be his own harshest critic.

The veteran and Oscar-winning actor, 65, had some choice words for his own performance in the "Harry Potter" franchise, where he played the boy wizard's godfather, Sirius Black.

"I think my work is mediocre in it," he said bluntly on the latest episode of the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, hosted by Josh Horowitz. "Maybe if I had read the books … if I had got ahead of the curve, if I had known what was coming, I honestly think I would have played it differently."

Oldman wasn't particularly kind to any of his past work, because he believes he can always improve. "I'll tell you what it is," he told Horowitz. "It's like anything, I think 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.

"It's so subjective," he continued. "It's such a personal thing that you're looking at that other people are not seeing. … It's not to disrespect someone who says to me, 'Oh, I really love you in that movie,' and I'm thinking, 'I'm terrible in that movie. What are they talking about?' It's not that. It's (that) they're seeing something else."

Oldman first joined the "Potter" franchise in 2004 film "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and would subsequently appear in two more installments before his character was killed in 2007's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

"I'm still upset about that," Oldman said on the podcast, referring to Sirius' death. The "Potter" cast apparently "were all taking bets, you know, it's Hagrid, and I was there going, no, no, no, maybe it's Ron," he added. "And then you kind of open the script and you go, it's me. I'm out of here."

Gary Oldman says 'Potter' and 'Batman' 'saved' him as a father

Earlier in December during an appearance on "The Drew Barrymore Show," Oldman thought back a bit more kindly on his "Potter" career, noting that working on those films and Christopher Nolan's "Batman" films allowed him to spend more time with his children as a newly divorced father.

"At 42 years old, I woke up, you know, sort of divorced and I had custody of these boys," he told Barrymore. "That, in itself, was … that was hard because there was a shift in the industry where a lot of productions were … in Hungary, Budapest, Prague, Australia, you know, all of these places. So, I turned down a lot of work." But "Potter" and the "Batman" movies filmed in the United Kingdom, Oldman's home.

"Thank God for 'Harry Potter.' I tell you, the two — 'Batman' and 'Harry Potter' — really, they saved me, because it meant that I could do the least amount of work for the most amount of money and then be home with the kids."