Christian Coulson (Tom Riddle) Talks Identifying with Voldemort
By Ani Bundel
Christian Coulson, the actor who played Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, talks how he identified with Voldemort.
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We’ve talked about Voldemort and the pure-blood movement before here on this site. But when we talk about the Dark Lord, we have a tendency to focus on the man–if one can call it that–which he became after splitting his soul asunder and losing his humanity, don’t to even his facial features.
But before there was Voldemort, there was a young boy named Tom Riddle. He was handsome, charismatic, and a bit on the rebellious side, before he turned down the path to darkness. We met that young man once, in the pages of a diary that houses a segment of his soul. That vision of who Voldemort once was was played by actor Christian Coulson.
With Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them soon arriving in theaters, and taking audiences back to the Wizarding World only a few years before a certain transfiguration professor made a stop over at Wool’s Orphanage and offered a special young man an invitation to Hogwarts, Coulson has found himself being asked again about what it was like to play Tom Riddle in that era of his life.
Speaking to Bustle, he talked about how much he identified with the series even before he was cast:
"“I had been at boarding school in a sort of Hogwarts-y school called Westminster, which has been around for about 1000 years. The stone steps leading up to where we had assembly are worn down from hundreds of years boys running up and down them. My parents were abroad when I was there, and I felt like I was an orphan. There was a detached survival mechanism that I really identified with.”"
He also fondly remembers his scenes with the late Richard Harris, who died shortly after filming, and how it felt like he was really speaking to someone who would have been a professor at his boarding school. But though Coulson’s life seemed to cross more with Harry and estranged parental figures that Riddle, who was a true orphan his whole life, Coulson says he identified with where Riddle was coming from more than Harry.
"“There’s a lot that isn’t similar about us, but I felt that I understood something about him.There’s something very wrong with him, but I understand what it is,” the 37-year-old actor says. “The things he did [as a teenager] made sense to me in terms of his survival…. From the information in those [four books], it seemed to me that there was a coldness and an emotional absence to his evil, and that was what I was interested in exploring.”"
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Though Coulson is now too old to play a young Tom Riddle in the new Fantastic Beasts, many speculate the character may in fact turn up again, as a reminder of the events to come. If so, they’ll have a very memorable performance to live up to and fill Coulson’s shoes.