10 Things You Didn't Know About Harry Potter's Scar

3. Over 5,000 Scars Were Applied Across The Movies

Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
Warner Bros.

With eight movies - each over two hours long - countless deleted scenes, multiple takes and dozens and dozens of stunts, the Harry Potter makeup team had to apply a hell of a lot of lightning bolt scars.

Across a ten-year stretch spanning from The Philosopher's Stone (2001) to The Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011), it's estimated that around 5,800 individual forehead-scars were stencilled onto Daniel Radcliffe, his doubles and his stunt performers.

Of that crazy number, 3,800 of those were on Radcliffe himself. With the scar template method, applications didn't take too long, but it's still a lot of work: these scars had to be drawn onto different foreheads, but each scar had to be in the exact same place as the last, in order to preserve continuity.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!