Gary Oldman has called out the royal family for not honouring his services to acting.
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, the Harry Potter and Slow Horses star expressed at being completely overlooked by the honours system.
“I don’t know why. You should ask them. No nod from the royals, but there we are,” he said. “Maybe it’s in my future.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Oldman spoke about being offered to play a Bond villain opposite Daniel Craig.
“I was asked quite a few years ago,” he confirmed, although he claimed to have forgotten which film it was. “The Bond villain didn’t ring with me,” he added.
Asked about the future of the franchise, the Oscar-winner offered up his own idea for a prequel, suggesting that his Slow Horses castmate Jack Lowden could play a young 007.
“I’d like to see a sort of prequel with him (Bond) in the Navy or something and becoming 007,” he said. “Jack’s probably a little young at the minute, but he could be a young Bond coming up through the ranks.”
In December, the actor spoke about how he felt about his performance as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films, which began with 2004’s Prisoner of Azkaban and wound up with 2007’s Order of the Phoenix (except for a cameo in the final film in 2011).
“I think my work is mediocre in it,” he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “No, I do. Maybe if I had [finished reading] the books like Alan [Rickman], 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.”
However, during a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, he fielded questions on the subject and clarified his sentiments, stressing that he didn’t want to “disparage anyone out there who are fans of Harry Potter and the films, and the character who I think is much beloved”.
“What I meant by that is, as any artist or any actor or painter, you are always hypercritical of your own work,” he continued (via Variety). “If you’re not, and you’re satisfied with what you’re doing, that would be death to me. If I watched a performance of myself and thought, ‘My God, I’m fantastic in this,’ that would be a sad day.”
Just weeks before his original comments, Oldman also took time to explain how the Potter films, as well as the Dark Knight trilogy, “saved” him when he became a single father.
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