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There are still marathons of the movies running on cable TV for Christmas each year. HBO even released the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts special on January 1, 2022.
Rupert Grint, Daniel Radcliffe, and Emma Watson at the Hand, Foot, and Wand-Print Ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on July 8, 2007, in Hollywood, California (Carrie Nelson / Shutterstock)
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It’ll be interesting to see how much further the series can go and where its now grown-up stars’ careers will go, too.
Speaking of the stars, isn’t it incredible that those actors had such a powerful screen presence at such a young age? Let’s take a look at how old each of the child actors was during the filming of the movie and how they were chosen for their roles.
Imagine being Christopher Columbus working on the first Harry Potter movie. You and your crew are responsible for picking child actors for an iconic series that must play these characters for a decade’s worth of movies.
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Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in the 2001 fantasy film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (also known as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
That’s a heavy responsibility! It took seven months of searching in 2000 before Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint were chosen for the roles.
Radcliffe was discovered by producer David Heyman and writer Steve Kloves in a theater. He already had a role in a BBC production of David Copperfield.
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Daniel Radcliffe was 12 years old when the first Harry Potter movie based on J. K. Rowling’s 1997 novel of the same name premiered in November 2001 (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
In hindsight, the casting is super impressive – it takes a keen eye to find talent like that, and the three never really had any big scandals either, so they got lucky in that department, too! Big props to casting director Janet Hirshenson for finding these talented kids.
Interestingly enough, Christopher Columbus stipulated that all the actors that were cast HAD to be British. He stuck to that rule hard, and even turned down Robin Williams for the role of Hagrid because of it!
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They ended up trying to give Daniel Radcliffe green contact lenses to match Harry’s description. Reportedly, the casting team had trouble finding the right actor because so many of the kids who auditioned had brown eyes and just wouldn’t have been able to wear the colored contacts because their eyes were too dark.
Daniel Radcliffe had an allergic reaction to the green color contacts he was supposed to wear in the movie (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
As it turns out, Daniel ended up having an allergic reaction to the green color contacts. While Harry Potter had green eyes in Rowling’s books, the author agreed to let Potter have blue eyes in the films.
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“It was brilliant because we put the glasses on and eventually we realized that I was allergic to them, ” Radcliffe said about his first pair of Potter glasses.
“I was actually allergic to the Harry Potter glasses. Because I had these two rings of whiteheads and spots that had come up around my eyes and it took us a week to realize that it was actually the glasses.”
Daniel Radcliffe had some acting experience but Emma Watson and Rupert Grint had never acted prior to Harry Potter (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
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In addition to that, they also wanted Emma Watson to wear fake buck teeth to better look like the nerdy Hermione. However, Radcliffe’s eyes had a bad reaction to the contacts and Watson had trouble speaking with the buck teeth in, so those ideas were eventually discarded.
When Radcliffe was in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, he was only eleven years old – he turned twelve around when the movie was released.
Funnily enough, he really wasn’t interested in playing Harry Potter at first at all! After his role in David Copperfield, he intended to quit acting altogether.
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His parents wanted him to quit and focus on schoolwork, too. But producer David Heyman was able to convince him (and his parents) otherwise.
Maggie Smith as Betsey Trotwood and Daniel Radcliffe as David Copperfield in the 1999 BBC television drama adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel David Copperfield (Credit: BBC)
What a sharp thing for an eleven-year-old to do! Incidentally, the main reason Harris took on the role was because his eleven-year-old granddaughter told him that she’d never speak to him again if he turned down Dumbledore. Harsh!
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The story of how Rupert Grint was cast as Ron Weasley is so fun. He actually performed a rap about himself and taped it to send into the studio!
He did a sketch dressed as his female drama teacher, too, and then did a video where he actually read some lines as Ron.
Rupert Alexander Lloyd Grint was 13 years old when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released in November 2001 (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
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He said that Harry Potter had actually been his favorite book series growing up and that Ron was always his favorite character. What a lucky kid to be able to play him on the big screen!
It’s funny, though, because Grint’s ambition in life was not really to be an actor. In fact, his dream was to become an ice cream man.
So, after he cashed some Harry Potter checks, he went out and bought an ice cream truck of his own and drove it around to give out free ice cream.
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According to Janet Hirshenson, there really weren’t that many actresses that were seriously in the running for Hermione, even though thousands applied.
She went on to say that the hardest part about casting Hermione was that they had to find someone who could play an annoying know-it-all without being too annoying – the audience still had to find her lovable.
Emma Watson was truly the one that swept the casting directors and producers away. She told Huffington Post, “As soon as Emma came on, there were six of us in the screening room. We just gasped. It was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Like, ‘Whoaaa!’
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Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson was 11 years old when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released in November 2001 (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
She took up the screen.” She was ten at the time she was cast, which made her eleven during the filming of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Fun fact: Emma Watson reportedly hated the way they styled her hair in the first movie. Eventually, the makeup department relented and let her have a less bushy hairstyle in the later films.
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Believe it or not, Tom Felton actually initially auditioned to be Ron Weasley. He auditioned to play Harry, too! But, of course, Felton landed the role of Draco Malfoy.
It’s hard to imagine him playing a Weasley, isn’t it? Felton jokingly said on MTV News that he was jealous of Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe for being cast in their roles.
Thomas Andrew Felton was 14 years old when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released in November 2001 (Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
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Harry Potter was not Felton’s first film role. When he was ten years old, he appeared in the 1997 adaptation of The Borrowers.
Funnily enough, Jim Broadbent plays Felton’s father in that movie – and Broadbent would later be cast in the Harry Potter movies as Horace Slughorn!
Tom Felton was thirteen years old when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone began filming in 2000. Felton said he actually was allowed to keep a few things from the set and still has those mementos.
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They include Draco’s Slytherin ring and a tie pin from the set. Of course, the production team wouldn’t let the actors keep anything too showy – they all wanted to take their wands home, but that was out of the question!
During the 2022 reunion special film Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, Emma Watson admitted she was in love with Tom Felton during the filming of Harry Potter.
“I walked into the room where we were having tutoring, ” she said. “The assignment that had been given was to draw what you thought God looked like, and Tom had drawn a girl with a backward cap on a skateboard. And I just don’t know how to say it — I just fell in love with him.”
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“I used to come in every day and look for his number on the call sheet, it was number seven, and if his name was on the call sheet, it was an extra exciting day. He was three years above me and so for him, he was like, ‘you’re like my little sister.’”
To this day, people are still shocked that Chris Columbus would step down from helming such a beloved franchise. I mean, he was pretty much set to make big banking movies for life if he had stuck with it!
In the end, though, after Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets,
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