Harry Potter’s Matthew Lewis admits he had to ‘turn his phone off for days’ and received a personal text from JK Rowling after his Attitude magazine cover went viral
Matthew Lewis has admitted that he was forced to turn his phone off after his shirtless Attitude magazine cover went viral last month.
Speaking exclusively to The Evening Standard at the Dockers Flannels for Heroes lunch, the Harry Potter star revealed that he was overwhelmed by the attention following the shoot and even received a message from JK Rowling after she publicly tweeted him.
He told us: “It was a good thing to do, the only thing is that it went a little bit more high-profile than I anticipated.
“The reaction was crazy – I turned my phone off for a couple of days, it was just a bit weird. It’s all nice stuff being said, I can’t complain about it, it’s very flattering. It’s just weird to have people talking about that.
Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, sent Lewis a tweet following the magazine’s release, saying: “Not as bad as watching Dan in Equus, but close. Warn me next time, for God’s sake.”
Adding: “I will always support you whatever you want to do, Matthew. Now go put some clothes on.”
Lewis, 25, reveals that the author sent him a text the next day, reassuring him that she was just joking.
He said: “Bless her, she messaged me the next day to say ‘you know it was was joked right’ – she’s so lovely.
“Even now after so any years of doing this job I still forget how massive Harry Potter is and how many millions of followers Jo Rowliing has and that every little thing she says gets picked up.
“It’s very easy to under-estimate that whole thing, so what I thought was just a bit of a thing between us that a few Harry Potter fans might see and enjoy became a huge thing.”
While Lewis’ cover gained him a whole new fanbase, his mother wasn’t too impressed with the surge of new attention.
He told us: “My mum, bless her, was not happy at all. My dad thought it was funny.
“But my mum is a magistrate and she was at the court and all of her colleagues who are magistrates were coming up to her going, “I saw your son” and she hadn’t seen it at this point.
“She knew I’d done something for a magazine. Anyway, someone showed her and she was mortified. So I got bit of earache from her. Apart from that it was great.”
Lewis has spent the last few months in training for his role as a trialthlete in new film Me Before You, for which he stuck to a strict diet.
He said: “I play a triathlete who is just constant focused on training – no alcohol, no salad. I’ve just finished doing that, I finished last week.
“I’ve put on abut a stone this week, I feel so fat. It’s been so good, I’ve eaten pizza, drank beer, it’s been so good… I probably need to stop eating cake at some point.”