Back in July, the AV Club interviewed Matthew Lewis and he talked about his experience auditioning for and working on the Harry Potter films. Read the full interview here or in the press archive.
AVC: Given your central, significant part in this film, are you dealing with media and public attention now on a different scale than you ever have before? Yeah. Yeah, it’s all a bit overwhelming, to be honest with you. I’ve got a publicist now, which is weird. Just to take care of all that kind of stuff. And you know, he’s calling me saying, “Have you seen this? Have you seen that?” I’m like, “Yeah. It’s crazy.” It’s overwhelming. I don’t really know what to make of it. I don’t know how Dan does it. I mean, his must be a bazillion times more than I’ve received in the last week or so. But he takes it all in a stride. But it’s all, for me… I can’t wait to go back home and disappear into relative obscurity for a bit. I just want to go back to my house and just get away from it all for a bit. [Pause.] It’s lovely! It’s so flattering to hear people say nice things about the performance, about the film. It’s great. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not shunning it. It’s just been such a bubble I’ve been in, with these promotions from the last 10, 12 days. I’m trying to process it all and I can’t really, until I get out of it. So I need to go home and just sit and think for a bit. It’s weird.
AVC: Do you get a lot of questions like that, where you’re asked to extrapolate the character for people and make judgments about his life off the page? Hmm, sometimes. Sometimes. Again, it’s an interesting thing. These are the kind of things that, years ago, I would’ve gone, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” But it really is very much an actor’s responsibility to know these things. Emma Watson was saying the other day that when Helena [Bonham Carter] was becoming [Hermione], or trying to become her for the polyjuice-potion sequence in this film, she was trying to take on Emma’s mannerisms, and she was asking Emma questions like, “What’s Hermione’s favorite color?” You know, because she wanted to absorb all this information and to know, in here [touches temple] what she was like. And as I’ve tried to develop as an actor, I see that these things, however much they seem insignificant… By knowing what’s Neville’s favorite Beatles song, you can know so much! In fact, my favorite Beatles song is “In My Life.” And from that, you can gauge that my friends mean so much to me. I love John Lennon, so it’s kind of like moody… There’s a lot you can gauge from that. As insignificant as it seems, as an actor, it’s an interesting way to approach a character.