Some stories are simply too large to fit neatly into a two-hour film. J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels were among them. While the eight-film franchise became one of cinema’s defining fantasy sagas, its journey from page to screen inevitably meant leaving characters, subplots and smaller moments behind.
That trade-off is something Gary Oldman knows particularly well. As Sirius Black, Oldman was part of a franchise that had to compress increasingly hefty novels into feature-length adventures. The actor has previously acknowledged that the films had to lose some of the “fabric and character detail” from the books while remaining proud of the phenomenon they ultimately became.
Now, with HBO preparing to retell the books as a television series, Oldman believes that the longer format could make the new adaptation a more rewarding experience for readers. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly at the Toronto International Film Festival, he said he believes the series will be “more satisfying” for viewers because it can follow the books much more closely.
Oldman explained that the films were forced to sacrifice a substantial amount of character detail to stay within their conventional runtimes. The new series, by contrast, is planned as a season-by-season adaptation of Rowling’s seven novels, giving each book significantly more space than it received on the big screen.
“I believe [the TV series is] going to do it pretty much word-for-word, which I think, as a viewer, would be more satisfying,” Oldman told EW. He added that the filmmakers behind the original movies had to cut a lot while trying to bring the stories down to around two-and-a-half to three hours.
The distinction could be particularly important for fans of the books who have long pointed to the omissions in the films. Peeves, for instance, is among the fan-favourite characters who never made it into the original film series, despite being an important recurring presence in the novels. Executive producer David Heyman has confirmed that the mischievous Hogwarts poltergeist will appear in the HBO adaptation.
Oldman, however, is not positioning the series as a replacement for the movies. In an earlier interview with the Los Angeles Times, he called the television adaptation “a great idea” precisely because it would allow the team to tell the “whole book”. He also said he does not expect to return to the Wizarding World, joking that he is now “too old” to reprise Sirius and suggesting that the producers would not want actors from the original films to “muddy the waters”.
The upcoming adaptation stars Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley. It is set to premiere on HBO and HBO Max on December 25, with each season expected to focus on one of Rowling’s novels.
