Matthew Lewis talks his first day on Harry Potter set

Matthew Lewis, known to Harry Potter fans as Neville Longbottom, gives his thoughts on filming the series, and talks about his current projects.

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Like the other members of the Harry Potter cast, Matthew Lewis has moved on to other things, but like other members of the Harry Potter cast, he’ll probably never stop being asked about his time filming the series. Speaking to Interview Magazine about his latest project, where he stars with a gaggle of other Fantasy genre actors in the romantic tearjerker Me Before You, one again the subject arose.

It’s always good to have a new story that people haven’t heard yet, so when the inevitable subject of playing Neville Longbottom came up once more, Lewis talked about his first day on the set.

"We were at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland and it was the scene with Madam Hooch, where we have the broomstick lesson and Neville flies off and crashes into the wall. I was used to television sets but this film set was a scale of which I was very unprepared for. It was enormous. Also, just to step into that world that I had read about for years and was such a huge fan of, to suddenly put the robes on, was spectacular. Chris Columbus, [the director,] came over and explained what was happening and about how this particular scene and this whole set piece was basically about Neville and about me—no pressure, you know? They looked after me very much and I had a week of my life just flying on this broomstick around this beautiful castle in the North of England. I thought, “If this is what my career is, if this is what I’m going to get paid to do for a living, then this is the dream.”"

Fifteen years later, and Lewis is still acting, appearing in movies like Me Before You and on TV series like Happy Valley, so it seems his dream has come true. He also talked a bit about spending time with British comedian Rik Mayall, who was originally going to play Peeves the Poltergeist, on the set of the first movie. “I sat next to him at the read-through and I was completely lost for words,” said Lewis, who had been a fan of Mayall before being cast in Harry Potter. “He really took me under his wing and started chatting me through the different characters behind the camera, who everybody was and what their job was, and he signed my script. It was a huge moment to be in that read-through surrounded by all of these amazing people who I’d seen on TV and then they were friendly and so unassuming.”

After a period in his mid-teens where he second-guessed himself, Lewis came out the other end of adolescence more confident, and ready to do other kinds of work. “I felt very much that I was starting at the bottom rung again and that being in Harry Potter was no gimmick,” he said. “I was going to have to leave that behind to lose the Neville Longbottom tag and prove that I could do other things, learn, and understand.”

On the more personal side of things, Lewis also gave an interview to Coach about his fitness regimen. Check out the interview in full if you like, but the takeaways are to be fearful of beer and jet lag getting in the way of your fitness goals.

Next: J.K. Rowling teases eventual Cursed Child tour

Also, while filming Me Before You in Wales, Lewis and costars Emilia Clarke (from Game of Thrones) and Sam Claflin (from The Hunger Games) wandered off and nearly got stampeded by a bunch of cows. “Imagine the headline tomorrow when they find our bodies,” Clafin said. “‘The Mother of Dragons, Finnick, and Neville: Crushed to Death by Cows in Wales.'” I’d read that story.

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