Gary Oldman would have played Sirius Black differently in the Harry Potter film franchise if he had read the source material.

The Dark Knight actor revealed during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast on Thursday that he would have approached the character differently if he had read J.K. Rowling’s books.

“I think my work is mediocre in it,” the Oscar-winning actor declared. “Maybe if I had read 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.”

Oldman played Harry’s godfather in 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and reprised the role in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, while he also had cameos in the Goblet of Fire and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.

The 65-year-old joked that he was “still upset” about his character getting killed off.

“They killed me off too early, I’m still upset about that. We were all taking bets, ‘It’s (going to be) Hagrid’… and then you open the script and you go, ‘It’s me. I’m outta here,'” he recalled.

Elsewhere in the interview, the British actor admitted “the most difficult thing (he) ever had to do” on a film shoot was lie next to a frozen lake in a studio for the scene in which Black’s soul is sucked from his body in the Prisoner of Azkaban.

“It took forever, it was slow, and we’d been on a scene for a week,” he remembered. “I had to just lie there for a week. Day in, day out, doing nothing. ‘I think my kidneys are getting a bit cold’ and they put a little hot water bottle under you… Then day three, you go, ‘My neck is killing me,’ and they’d put a little pillow underneath it. The hardest thing I had to do was lie next to a frozen lake.”

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