For the three young actors who were children when they were thrust into the limelight in the Harry Potter films, the pressure might have been too much had it not been for Watford, one of them said yesterday.
Rupert Grint, who has played Potter’s sidekick Ron Weasley since he was 10, said that the town was a powerful antidote to the unreality of growing up in the biggest-grossing film series in cinema history.
The actor, speaking before the world premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 today, was asked whether he was afraid of buckling under the pressure of being exposed to fame so young. “People are constantly surprised that we’re not messed up,” he said. “If we had filmed in America, maybe. Where we film is Watford. It’s not the most glamorous place at all.”
Daniel Radcliffe, who recently admitted that he had given up drinking because he felt that he had overindulged at parties during the later Harry Potter films, spoke for all the principal cast when he said that it would be hard to adjust to life after Potter.
“Myself, Rupert and Emma [Watson] have spent 12 years of our lives together. I think that the bond is unbreakable, because they’re the only ones who know what it’s like to go through that craziness.”
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Watson said that she found it strange that the routine she had known for a decade had ended. “You’re used to having gaps between the films of five to six months, and [five months] after the last one ended I felt this itch, like, I’m ready to go back, and of course I wasn’t. It’s so difficult to process.”
The actress, who founded her own clothing brand and is the face for the French cosmetics company Lancôme, described being separated from her character as a “grieving process”. “When people ask what I’ll miss most, of course I’ll miss the people, but I’ll miss just being her.
“I think Hermione is such an incredible woman. I think growing up alongside her definitely pushed me. I think she made me a better person and made me work harder, just through comparing myself with her. So I have to thank her for that.
“I was emotional anyway about the film ending, but I was also going through my own grieving, saying goodbye to Dan, saying goodbye to Harry.”
The actor most visibly affected by the end of the series was Grint, who said that the spectre of the premiere in Leicester Square, Central London, was making him confront feelings that he has buried. “I have felt a little bit lost without [the filming] really, and not knowing what to do with myself. These ten years have come down to a two-hour-and-ten-minute film and I don’t know how to feel.
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“I did get quite choked up when I saw the film. One particular scene after the battle, there are the three of us on the bridge and you can see the school behind us is destroyed. It’s a weird parallel to our lives with it all coming to an end.
“It takes a lot for me for tears to actually come out, so I was surprised on the last day of filming. All of us cried.”