Now this was exciting. I love Harry Potter. I'm one of the many adults who knows their Sectumsempra from their Ravenclaw (the second one is intelligent and good; the first is very, very bad). We received an invite for an Order Of The Phoenix round table, where they bring out various Dumbledore's Army actors and actresses who are quizzed by a number of press people. It was in a fantastically posh hotel somewhere in the Kensington region. There were sandwiches and chipsticks. All the other journalists looked to be regulars, with many at my table knowing each other, all of them film experts (not necessarily Potter ones though) who chatted away and barely let you get a question in. I was a music journalist who wanted to be cast as Tonks. But I did manage to establish - without prompting - that Neville Longbottom is a Pigeon Detectives fan. Evanna Lynch was delightful, Katie Leung was quite shy, and Bonnie Wright was talkative and professional. They grow up so fast nowadays...
Words - Suzy Sims
Previously published on Native.tv http://www.native.tv in June and July 2007
(c) Niche News & Publishing Ltd
Matthew Lewis
Katie Leung
Bonnie Wright
Evanna Lynch
The fifth Harry Potter film '...Order Of The Phoenix' has a hotly anticipated release this summer. In the film, the refusal of the authorities to believe Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) has returned alarms Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). Realising they have to take up the fight themselves, they form a society called Dumbledore's Army and set about learning defensive spells, joined by several brave classmates.
MATTHEW LEWIS (NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM)
We're sat in a plush London hotel ready to meet Leeds lad Matthew Lewis, better known to millions as Harry Potter's classmate Neville Longbottom. Neville is the chubby, shy and under-achieving one of the group who doesn't quite seem to fit in. He is nervous about his abilities which makes him perform magic badly, with many spells going awry. The other Gryffindor students aren’t entirely fond of him to begin with as he seems uncool and frankly a bit dim. It takes a challenge or two for Neville to start standing up for himself and a bit of confidence does his skills no end of good.
In real life Matthew Lewis doesn’t look like Neville; far from it. He's 18 at the end of June, is wearing a denim jacket over a Stone Roses t-shirt and has definite stubble.
“I just need a shave! Yeah, it’s quite weird actually. It’s almost like leading two completely different lives and being two very different people, and not being called insane! It’s fun ‘cause I have this fat suit and I have a side parting in my hair, and there’s things that stick my ears out, and then at the end of the day I get to take it all off and be me again. It’s very bizarre. I really, really love doing it, and I guess that’s why actors do it, just to be someone else for however long. It’s fun.”
One of the plus sides of the dodgy outfit is that Matthew doesn’t get recognised a lot in public. “Around my home town of Leeds I do a little bit, what with regional newspapers and TV programmes, and just ‘cause people know me from school or whatever. But when I’m down in London I’m fine, or in a foreign country it’s great. I can go down the local Morrison’s or whatever and pick things up and not get mobbed."
Matthew’s acting career started way before the Potter series, which he first began filming at the tender age of 11. His parents don’t quite understand where the acting bug comes from –it certainly isn’t hereditary as they hate being in front of the camera.
His brother Anthony won a part in Heartbeat as a child, and Matthew was brought along by his mum who was chaperoning.
“I just assumed it was another job that people did and I kept nagging his agent to ask if I could join up. She kept saying no, it was a kid’s agency but I was too young at three and four. And then eventually I got to five and I just nagged her so much she went ‘Right, I’m going to send you for an audition, and then you can join when you’re six, if it’ll shut you up,’ and I went and got the part for this TV film (Some Kind Of Life, starring Ray Stevenson and Jane Horrocks). So she said I could join after that.”
One of the things Matthew is proud of is the impact the character of Neville has had on others. “Meeting the fans is one thing that I actually love. I think it’s fantastic. To hear the feedback, and people have actually said to me that they’ve been bullied at school or they have problems with teachers intimidating them, and watching Neville helps them deal with it and they can relate to it. It’s just the best feeling ever that you can do a job like this, have so much fun, get paid for it and still affect people’s lives in that way.”
He’s particularly impressed with the way that bumbling Neville has developed through the films, coming to a head in …Order Of The Phoenix. “He becomes really courageous in this film, and just becomes really reckless and stupid. He just wants to do the right thing. He doesn’t care about his own safety, he just wants to help out his friends and make sure the bad guys don’t win and it was really fun to do as an actor because growing up with Neville you see him being shy, you saw in the first one an inkling of his courage, and actually to come out at the end of this fifth one was great.”
The sheer scale of ‘Harry Potter’ is still taking some getting used to. “You just have to watch the credits to see just how many people work on the film, and the scale of the sets, the amount of money put into it, it’s unbelievable, it’s like nothing I’ve ever done before. Like we work nothing compared to what the crew do, they work so hard constantly. When we get up in the morning and come in they’ve already been there a few hours before, and they leave a fair few hours after, and they do about double the months we spend on it, and it’s something else, it really is. And then coming down to a five star hotel in London and doing interviews for people all over the world - it’s something unheard of in Heartbeat!
“And also the premieres, it’s indescribable the amount of fun you have at a premiere. When you get out of the car, you never get used to it. Just to get out and hear people screaming not Neville but Matthew, I’ll never, ever get over that.”
The Harry Potter cast all get on well, which is very lucky seeing as they spend so much time together. “I’d say that Dan and Rupert are my best friends on set, I’m always in Rupert’s room playing pool or darts. He’s got the best room ever! He’s got a dartboard, pool table, table tennis, massive TV... Or I’m in Dan’s room listening to some new album he wants me to buy. We love a very similar sort of music. I do like having debates with Dan. The North versus the South. That’s the debate we always have. Beatles v the Rolling Stones. All that kind of thing. I’d say I win [the argument], but I’m sure he’d disagree!”
Outside of the set, Matthew spends a lot of time supporting his beloved and beleagured Leeds United, commenting that the torture they provide helps him deal well with Neville's traumatic moments. He jokes that he can't afford to help them out financially as "Ken Bates is asking too much!"
And as for Matthew’s career plans after Neville? “I would very much like to stay in films. Just ‘cause of just the scale of it I guess, being able to stay in these kind of hotels, you know what I mean?
“I definitely want to start going into other roles. I’ve sort of been wondering what to do and I do love comedy, I thoroughly enjoy making people laugh. My brothers are some of the funniest people I know and they make me laugh, if I can make anyone laugh as much as they make me then I’m very happy. So that’s something I’d like to do."But what I really loved this year in …Order of the Phoenix was the emotional drama side of Neville’s character, that was a real challenge for me. So if I could get anything that would challenge me even further then that would be great.
“It’s very strange to think that, that after all this time – since I was 11, so it’s six years already, and however long to go - that it’s all going to come to an end, it’s very strange. Those that are so into the book and know their characters, for it to end it’s going to be very disconcerting. And I’m not really looking forward to it. But I guess by that time I’ll be however old, and I can drive now, so it won’t be too bad I’ll be able to see everybody.”
Anyway, it won’t be ending for a few years yet. So back to Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix. “This year the character’s become so much more integral into the story, and we find a lot more about his past, his background and why he is as he is. And you’ve still got the comedy light-hearted humour bit but then he’s got a bit more action stuff to do towards the end which I’ve not done before so that was a lot of fun to shoot.
“We go to the Ministry of Magic and we’re fighting Voldemort’s Death Eaters. There’s a lot of running about and we fall through this door and it’s like a long fall into oblivion which we had to do, and it’s kind of like a Mission: Impossible style stunt on wires on our chests which was really cool. And we did jumping from rock to rock; wasn’t very high, but it was fun to do anyway. And then we had make up on with blood coming out of my nose. Just stuff like that we’ve not done before. It was great to be in an action film for a while.”
Matthew finds it ‘really weird’ that he will know exactly what he’ll be doing in a few years by reading ahead. “I was always a fan, I used to lose myself in the story and I’m in the universe and all of a sudden I’ll stop at the end of the book and think – wow, I’m going to be doing that in a few years. That’s going to be really fun.”
And for Neville’s future? Matthew would like him “to live, if possible! Or as long he dies in a really heroic way and like saves somebody else’s life, that’d be okay. I wouldn’t mind that. I think he will see it through to the end, and I think he’ll be fighting alongside Harry all the way, doing the right thing.”
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KATIE LEUNG (CHO CHANG)
Katie Leung walks in the room calmly and shyly. She’s wearing a short sleeved white cardi over a grey top and is softly spoken with a delicate Scottish lilt.
One of the newer characters, Cho Chang first appears in …Goblet of Fire. She’s an intelligent and slightly older girl in Ravenclaw house who Harry develops something of a crush on, and she's left confused and heartbroken when her boyfriend Cedric is killed during the Triwizard Tournament by a newly returned Lord Voldemort. Cho likes Harry back, but her emotional state leaves her a bit of a wreck most the time.
Motherwell-born Katie first got into the Harry Potter films when her dad suggested she go along to an open casting. It took several hours of queuing and a quick screen test before she was invited back to a workshop, then was told she had the part. Her father says she had no previous acting experience, not even for a school play.
She’s asked if she’s been rather spoilt having Potter as a starting point for her acting career. “You can’t be picky as an actress. It’s a very unstable sort of career. I’m still in the early stages - I mean all I’ve done is Potter so I’d like to go on to all different sort of things.”
Was it any different the second time around? “I enjoyed it just as much, I mean it was different because I’d be coming back to familiar faces again. It’s kind of like a second home to me now, Leavesdon. So I felt much more relaxed in front of people, in front of the camera, and just kind of learned to ignore it. It was good. Sometimes when say, you’re talking to somebody, and the camera’s right in front of you and it’s kind of hard to ignore it, your eye just kind of catches it. But no, I mean you just get used to it.”
Now she’s one of the ‘familiar faces’ herself, did she help the even newer cast members such as Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood) fit in? “She was really sweet when she first came in, she did look incredibly nervous.
"We stayed in the same apartment for the first few weeks or so of filming and I just got to know her a little better, we went to the park and we watched movies together and stuff. She’s such a lovely girl and she’s handling it really well. And she’s such a big fan of the films, so I’m really happy for her.”
Is Katie coping with all the madness, interviews and promotional hype around the films? “I don’t really get used to it because you know it’s not like you’re constantly doing it. I just definitely didn’t realise it was going to be on such a big scale, doing all these interviews and the size of the premiere with all the fans, and getting to travel everywhere, it’s definitely not a bad thing! [The strangest thing I’ve been asked]… what would I change if I was Queen. Yeah something like that.”
Six journalists excitedly wait to see what it the answer is. “Er, I said I would make everyone ride bikes in London. Drivers are mental.”
In Glasgow everything’s just peachy is it, asks someone. “Yep!” she says proudly.
She finds it a “really strange and cringeworthy” experience watching herself back at the cinema. “When I watched it at the cinema it was one of the biggest screens in London with thousands of other people. There’s nothing really you can do about it, you just have to sit and watch and hopefully the reactions you get from the audience tell you whether you did a good job or not.”
Someone comments that with something the size of Harry Potter, Katie could be watching other films and see herself in a trailer, or a bus with her face on it will pass. She smiles. “Yeah, I think that happened when I was promoting the film in Japan last year. They had my big face on a bus and it was really, really strange you know, you travel halfway around the world and it’s just odd.”
You can travel for free when that happens, explains one of the journalists. That’s a law. She laughs.
As her mother attended the UK premiere, she took her father on the promo tour of Japan “on a break because he works really hard and stuff. When there was the premiere in Japan, he was watching at the side while I was doing interviews and he didn’t see me as his daughter, he just saw me as Cho Chang, which is really strange.”
Although …Order of the Phoenix was a return to Leavesden and the cast members Katie had worked with before, there was one major change – David Yates replaced …Goblet of Fire director Mike Newell. She describes them as both different and brilliant.
“I have a special bond with Mike because he took part in picking me for the role, and he was so great. But so was David, he was really gentle, he was really soft-spoken, and just he would sort of pull me to a corner and then he would give me his opinions on my character and ask what I thought about my character, then sort of have a little discussion. And he would tell me how my character was going through a really bad time and she’s really emotional, and just the way he said it made me want to cry! He was great at doing that and he put me in the mood, in the zone.”
One of the main scenes for Katie involves Harry Potter’s first kiss with Cho Chang. It’s highly anticipated and there’s a lot of teasing about it. “I’m not sure how nervous [Dan Radcliffe] was but God I was so nervous, I was so worried. Just ‘cause people were constantly mentioning the kiss and all my friends were just asking me how it was going. The schedule’s always changing, so when you think it’s coming up they could set it back ‘til a week later and you wouldn’t know.
“The funny thing was, I was just having sleepless nights over it and when the set date finally came Daniel felt ill. He was dreading it that much!” she jokes.
In the end, the terrifying scene turned out to be “fine”. “We sort of had a laugh just before it, you know ‘Have you had your breathmint, have you brushed your teeth?’, stuff like that. It wasn’t 30 takes! Everyone says it was. It was much less than that.”
Now her friends as well as a lot of annoying journalists keep asking how it went. “It went by in such a flash and you know I think when you’re a bag of nerves nothing really sticks in your mind, it’s all just a blur.
“What I’m hoping for is it’s going to satisfy everyone’s perception of how the kiss is going to look. Hopefully when an audience see it they’ll think back to when they had their first kiss, you know it’s supposed to be a very awkward moment but sweet and very endearing at the same time. Everybody’s looking forward to it because a lot of people watched Harry Potter grow up and you can’t miss the kiss, you’ve got to see it!”
Katie might be recognised a little more often after this film is released. Currently very few people realise who she is, which she says is good. “I mean you don’t want people coming up to you all the time going ‘Oh look, there’s her’. But yeah, you get the odd few who just come up and say ‘I love the films’.
"Most of them aren’t sure, they come up and say ‘Are you the girl from Harry Potter?’ and sometimes I’ll say ‘No, but I get told that I look like her a lot. I get it all the time’. But sometimes I say yeah, and it’s nice things they say. They’re like ‘Oh I really enjoyed the films and I hope filming’s going well at the moment’.”
As for the future, Katie isn’t sure if she’ll carry on acting or if she’ll study graphic design or media at university, saying her indecisiveness is “one of the worst things” about her. But there’s one thing she’s definite on – reading the last book. It’s already on pre-order “and I’ll probably go in at midnight to queue up and find out what happens.” Look out for her in a queue near you.
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BONNIE WRIGHT (GINNY WEASLEY)
Sixteen-year-old Bonnie Wright enters the room and sits at the table. She’s wearing a pale pink hoodie and a vest top with thin black and white stripes. Maybe it’s the lighting, but her hair doesn’t seem as ginger as you’d expect from a Weasley. She’s well spoken and friendly, and occasionally her enthusiasm makes her try and say several things at once.
Her character is Ginny Weasley, younger and shyer sister of Ron. She starts with a bit part in the first film – and a crush on Harry - then has the misfortune of being possessed by Voldemort in …Chamber Of Secrets. …Order Of The Phoenix sees Ginny coming out her shell as a person and becoming a bit of a Quidditch whiz, as well as displaying something of that Weasley cheeky sense of humour.
The Weasley family is one of the more comforting and stabilising aspects for Harry, introducing him to the ways of the wizarding world, and also providing him with a sense of family. Rupert Grint (Ron), James Phelps (Fred) and Oliver Phelps (George) have been in like Bonnie’s older brothers in real life.
“Through doing all The Burrow scenes and in this film there’s quite a funny Christmas scene at Grimmauld Place, the Black house, so definitely I think it’s been quite like a brotherly family relationship.” Julie Walters has also been keeping up her role as loveable worrying mother Molly – “She likes to have a quite a little cuddly, family running around, but I think she definitely brings so much kind of energy to the Weasley family. We’re all meant to be so bubbly, no matter what’s happening we’re still smiling and I think she keeps that smile on in a lot of the scenes and we kind of mirror her.”
As for Rupert, he’s more like Fred and George in real life, always pulling pranks and corpsing on set. “He just completely laughs all the time when we’re on set, he just can’t stop and half the time he doesn’t even know what he’s laughing about. We’re in the middle of a scene and he’ll be trying hide his giggles and we’re all just laughing away with him. So I think he keeps us giggling probably a bit too much…”
Bonnie’s been getting on particularly well with Katie Leung (Cho Chang), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) and Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood). She’s asked if there’s a ‘girls versus boys’ feeling on set. “Yeah people say that, I don’t know!” she laughs. “No, I think especially towards the end of this film there was the six of us, and we had to do a lot of action; different bits together, but we had to be quite intense together as part of the scene. Three girls, three boys, so that was quite good.
”It’s like a second home almost [Leavesden], and we all have our dressing rooms that we’ve done up. Also from each film we haven’t seen each other for a while, so when we get back there it’s almost like we’re all going back to Hogwarts and back for our school term. Being there is definitely good ‘cause you’re kind of used to it.”
And the young actors aren’t too frightened to work around their more experienced adult counterparts, such as Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham-Carter and Julie Walters. “I think for us it’s amazing to have them there because we’re definitely learning from them all the time. They’re all kind of open to of our endeavours in all the scenes. They’ve done so much compared to us, but I think the dynamic is good, and I think they enjoy it.”
She’s asked if the adults tell them off for being rowdy. “No, sometimes we’re telling them off!” she laughs.
Going on to other work after Harry Potter is more of a challenge, says Bonnie, because you’re used to relaxing around familiar faces on set. She’s had parts in Stranded and Agatha Christie: A Life In Pictures. Despite all this experience, she isn’t sure if she wants acting as a ‘total’ career. She’s always wanted to go to art school and might still, although her interest in the film industry means she might do something behind the camera. Luckily her interest here is encouraged by Stuart Craig, the production designer and she enjoys watching the team at work:
“It’s really kind of interesting to go kind of even now they’ve started all their designs for the next film. They’re still working there all the time while we’re not there. And the costume department, I mean the amount of designs that go through… each film has like a new character and they’ve got to design what they’ll look like, so I really look like how they kind of take it from the book into the film.”
Bonnie says director David Yates came in with a strong insight into the films. “I think everyone has to kind of create a new film because it’s obviously their film and they want to put a new energy into it. I think he’s a real kind of actor/director, he likes to have your opinions gel, he wants you to be a part I suppose of what it’ll end up as.
“He’s thinking about every character and we’re thinking mainly about how we’re reacting and what we’re doing. He’s not someone who says ‘Right, this is how I want to do it and everyone this is what you’re doing.' He always kind of lets us know what’s in his mind, and I think that’s good for us. He’s very direct in what he wanted and I think that created a bit more kind of energy and fluency.”
It can be tricky visualising those bizarre creatures and spells which are all such normal parts of the wizarding world according to JK. “Seeing all the concept drawings and the models you really have to picture exactly what they are and what they’re doing in front of your eyes. A lot of different spells produce different shapes and forms, so it’s made me a bit more aware of what you have to imagine in front of you.”
The action scenes of …Order Of The Phoenix were particularly enjoyable to film. “Part of the Ministry of Magic scenes are very dark, but then there is a lot of kind of… one minute it’s intense, the next minute, kind of legging it down the hallway with prophecies smashing behind us, so it was fun to have a bit of a run.”
The feedback Bonnie’s received from fans has always been positive. “People kind of stop you in the street and say ‘Are you…?’ and they always kind of, you can always see them thinking out in all their head. But it’s always been really positive, and it’s always made me aware of exactly how big the audience is, it’s not just completely a children’s film you know, mums and dads are as interested as their five year old kids, so I think that’s made me really appreciate how many people are really a part of it.”
At the moment there’s not too much pressure on Bonnie during filming. “I think there’s a slight pressure in that people want to see how you’ve developed because if we all stayed pretty much the same they would get bored, so I think through character development and making each film different is something that will impress them. So I think that’s something that I’m quite concentrated on, but I don’t think it’s ever a kind of negative pressure that I get.”
Lastly, Bonnie thinks it’ll be sad when they get to the end of filming and realise they have nothing to look forward to. “I hope there’s an eighth one but there won’t be! Yeah I think it will be sad when we finish the last one, but we’ll have been doing it for about ten years so that’s going to be a large kind of chunk out of all of our lives.”
Enough of looking too far into the future for now – the release of ‘Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix’ is just around the corner…
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EVANNA LYNCH (LUNA LOVEGOOD)
Evanna Lynch is a pale wisp of a girl. She's wearing a patterned, peach-coloured top and she’s wearing a bracelet with an opal-like stone. She has a quietly spoken Irish accent which often comes across as dreamy, like her character.
Evanna plays Luna Lovegood, who's in Ginny Weasley's year but in Ravenclaw House. Luna’s a nice girl, but seems to often be in another world mentally. Believing in superstitions and mystical creatures which Hermione and Ron scoff at, her peculiarity marks her out and she’s often picked on by other students who call her ‘Loony’ behind her back, which isn’t helped by her habit of wearing odd jewellery made from Butterbeer corks. Despite his embarrassment at her behaviour sometimes, Harry finds himself liking the dreamy girl who is something of an outsider like himself.
The young actress playing her is from the village Termonfeckin in Ireland. Getting into films is generally ‘not what we do here’ and Evanna occasionally finds children recognising and pointing at her in town, although her friends and family are getting used to it and say they’re proud. She once wrote to JK Rowling complaining that nothing ever happened – JK wrote back: “Don't be too hard on Termonfeckin; it does have a brilliant name! And I come from a very sleepy place.”
Evanna’s father flew her to London for the Luna Lovegood open casting, where she beat some 15,000 other girls to the role.
It must have been so exciting for the teenager to have been chosen for the part because she’s a fan of the books and films. Not just any casual fan – Evanna calls herself a ‘serious’ fan and Harry Potter was her main interest, resulting in many an online visit to MuggleNet, which she looks forward to even now.
“Like my brother’s [hobby] is hurling and my sister’s is music, but mine is Harry Potter. I just think I was always saying that I wish we could study it in school then I wouldn’t have to do homework, it would be great.” She jokes that the plus point is she can now make money out of her pastime.
What attracted her to the books in the first place? “Because it was an escape from normal life you know, because it’s fantasy and all this amazing stuff (JK Rowling) dreams up. And yet they’re really normal, Harry and Ron and Hermione; they’re called witches and wizards but they’re just the same as us except that they are talented at a different thing, which is magic.”
Her great knowledge of the series means she knows the other characters’ lines well; in fact her and her friends used to read the books aloud for fun. “There was always a girl playing Harry and Ron, and then sometimes I would just laugh when I would hear Dan or Rupert or Emma saying the same line as my friends do and I’m with them. That’s very surreal!”
She describes her reaction to the call saying she had the part as “very stunned… I’d been dreaming about it for so long. I was just very, very wide-eyed and I wanted to drink in everything, you know. I wanted eyes all around my head. I loved it.
"The first two weeks of it, I went from just doing homework and doing normal things at home to sitting in a read-through with all of the cast. They were very very fast two weeks but I’m getting more used to it now. People will say ‘You’re going to be fighting a Death Eater and he’s six foot’ and I’m like ‘Yes ok!’” she says brightly.
How did Evanna respond to meeting the cast in the flesh after seeing them on screen for so many years? “[When she first met Daniel Radcliffe] I was calm on the outside but on the inside I was screaming and jumping. But he probably doesn’t know that.”I think I’ll always be a little bit ‘Oh, look, Harry’ but he’s more Dan now. For the first few months I was calling everyone their character name and I was very stubborn about that,” she laughs. It took a while to adjust to how the actors are very different to their characters, which felt odd at first but “the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff.”
It was a whole new experience seeing how the films are made. Scenes aren’t shot in order and the set isn’t build exactly how you’d expect when watching the films. “It’s not a whole castle built in a studio. And I went in and I was made to see bits of Diagon Alley just strewn around the place.”
Luna is a curious character and her kookiness meant she had some ‘amazing’ outfits and jewellery. Sadly, as Evanna discovered, you can’t take bits home to show them to people. “You can try it, but you won’t get away with it!
“You’re given your wand on set by the props people and usually as you’re going out of the set they‘re standing taking wands. Sometimes they would be distracted like they’re talking to somebody and you’d run off set. We had wand pockets in our trousers or skirts or whatever so I would stick it there - but they would always come and find you!”
Her favourite film so far to watch has been …Prisoner Of Azkaban. “It was the most artistic of them, the most different. All the others, a lot of people like them because number four and number two, they go by the books so much. [Director Alfonso] Cuarón kind of changed things. He moved the location of Hagrid’s house and he put in shrunken heads and I thought, I like that. I like seeing another person’s take of the book, even if it wasn’t exactly the same.”
Someone suggests Evanna could have influenced some part of the story if she made any suggestions during filming. “Yeah, that’s nice,” she smiles, although she admits to being quite nervous about making comments because everyone on the set has been working there for years, whereas she's a newcomer.“Me and Bonnie were saying we should get the six of us to [direct] the last one, like Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville, Ginny and Luna. But I don’t think so!”
Is she looking forward to seeing herself on screen? As a fan of the books first and foremost, Evanna is a little worried whether she has done the character justice. “I’ll be so excited just to see the film of course. Luna matters so much to me I’m a bit worried that I’ll be like ‘That’s not Luna’ but I’ll try and enjoy it.”
So far, she’s met JK Rowling a couple of times. What’s the author like? “Ah, she was brilliant, she was. She has kind of a magical air about her and everyone says: ‘I bet she was really down to earth, I bet she was really nice’. She’s really nice but there’s also something mysterious about her, and that’s what’s nice you know, she’s special.
“She’s happy that I’m playing Luna and she just kind of talks to me about her and anything I’m wondering about, like ‘would she do this?’ she’d help.” When JK Rowling met Evanna, she reportedly described her as ‘perfect’ for the role of Luna.
As an 11-year-old and in hospital, Evanna was let out for a few hours so she could buy a copy of …Order Of The Phoenix. To mark the occasion, the youngster dressed a Harry Potter t-shirt and had Golden Snitches painted on every other nail. She also used to dress in homemade t-shirts to watch the premieres streamed online and thinks it’s ‘weird’ that this time she’ll be on the other side of the barrier.
When the final book of the series, ‘Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows’ is released, Evanna’s undecided as to where she’ll go. “I think I’ll go to England because in Ireland they’re not so hardcore as the English and the Americans so… I want to go somewhere where there’s really loads of excitement.”
When it comes down to the world of Harry Potter, Evanna Lynch certainly shouldn’t have any trouble finding excitement there.
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix is released in UK cinemas from July 12th.
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