9 Actors Who Hated Working On Harry Potter Movies
Great movies, but an unsatisfying experience for many of its cast.
Harry Potter is of course one of the biggest and most successful media empires the world has ever seen, and the film franchise has launched the careers of literally dozens of talented actors.
But it shouldn't be terribly surprising that not everyone had a great time making the movies, whether young performers just starting out in the industry or veterans of the old-guard who found the experience a little too much like an assembly line.
These 9 actors all had varying degrees of strife while working on the series, whether bit-part players or mainline cast members who were effectively tied into franchise commitments for a decade.
Things got bad enough that some of them even considered quitting the gig mid-series, while others merely thought of the money as they toughed it out, only revealing their creative and personal frustrations years after-the-fact.
If nothing else, these stories confirm just how difficult it is to keep everyone happy on such a gargantuan movie project, and how the art of acting itself can get lost in the machinery of the blockbuster conveyor-belt...
9. Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley)
Unlike most of the other Potter cast members, Rupert Grint actually had no plans to make a career out of acting.
And being a natural introvert by his own admission, he found the experience of shooting and promoting the films so daunting that he considered quitting the franchise after the release of the fourth film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Grint said:
"I had just finished my GCSEs. I thought 'Do I actually want to keep doing this? It's a bit of a drag.' Because obviously, it's a big sacrifice. You take for granted anonymity, just doing normal stuff, just going out. Everything was different and a little bit scary. There were times when I was like 'I'm done.'"
"It's almost like having a split personality. Sometimes it can be quite dehumanising to have people just taking pictures of you when you're out. To them, you are just this one thing. It's a weird existence. But that's my life. I can't really remember life before it. In a weird way, you become blasé about it. It becomes normal and you adapt."
This feeling of malaise lingered even after the films were completed, as in addition to saying that starring in the series "ruined" Harry Potter for him, he pondered whether he wanted to continue pursuing acting as his life's vocation:
"We had such an intimate and intense few years in this bubble. When I started, [acting] was never something that I aspired to do. I did acting with school plays and stuff like that. But it was never something that I actively dreamed of. I mean, I fell in love with it while I was doing it. But I definitely did think, 'Is this really what I want to do?' I wanted to live a little bit. I felt like I'd missed out on a lot."
As much as the Potter franchise has afforded Grint a reported net worth of around $50 million, he nevertheless likened exiting the franchise to like "stepping out of an institution."