Gary Oldman thinks the show is going to beat the films at their own game, and he's not being diplomatic about it.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, picked up separately by Variety and Deadline, the actor who played Sirius Black across four Harry Potter movies said HBO's forthcoming series has one thing going for it that the Warner Bros. Films never managed: room.

"We had to cut a lot, and still we could only get the films down to, like, three hours," Oldman said. "I believe it's gonna do it pretty much word-for-word, which I think, as a viewer, would be more satisfying."

That's a pointed comment coming from him. Oldman has said before that his own character got shortchanged on screen. Sirius shows up in Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004, gets reduced to a cameo in Goblet of Fire, returns properly in Order of the Phoenix, and then, as Oldman put it in an earlier interview, "turned up and then he went through the veil." Not much of an arc for a character book readers loved.

A slower burn, by design

HBO's version is structured to avoid exactly that kind of compression. Season one wrapped shoot and lands on HBO and HBO Max on December 25. Season two, adapting Chamber of Secrets, is already in pre-production at Leavesden. A season per book is the plan, and that pacing is the whole pitch: less abridging, more of what got left on the cutting room floor the first time round.

The cast so far runs deep. Dominic McLaughlin plays Harry, Arabella Stanton is Hermione, Alastair Stout is Ron. John Lithgow takes on Dumbledore, Janet McTeer is McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu plays Snape, Nick Frost is Hagrid. Warwick Davis, who appeared in the films as Flitwick, returns to the role for the series. HBO hasn't cast Sirius Black yet, so whether Oldman's old part gets more screen time than he did remains an open question nobody's answered.

Oldman isn't dumping on his own legacy here either. He called the franchise "such a phenomenon, the like of which I don't think you're ever gonna see again," and gave credit to original director Chris Columbus for setting the whole thing up and casting it in the first place. "We were extraordinarily lucky to have those people come back again, and again, and again," he said, "and literally grow into those roles."

He's also been characteristically hard on his own work in the films, once calling his Sirius "mediocre" before walking that back, saying actors are always their own harshest critics and that being satisfied with a performance "would be death" to him.

Oldman's next stop is Season 6 of Apple TV's Slow Horses, premiering September 16, days before this interview surfaced. Whether he has any interest in stepping back into the Wizarding World, even as a guest, is a different question, and HBO hasn't said anything about legacy cast cameos for the new series.

For now the countdown is to December 25, when fans get to test his theory against three hours of movie versus however many hours HBO gives book one to breathe.