Bonnie Wright, who played Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter franchise, is opening up about her time in Hogwarts and why she was frustrated over her character’s limited screen time in the films.
During a recent episode of Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast, the actress, who was just 9 years old when she was cast in the film, admitted that she had some anxiety going into filming because she wanted to do the beloved character justice.
“I definitely feel there was anxiety toward performing and doing the best thing as my character built,” Wright said. “It’s like, ‘Oh gosh, will I do justice to this character that people love?’ So that was always hard to do, especially when, inevitably, a lot of the scenes of every character were chopped down from the book to the films. So you didn’t really have as much to show in the films.”
But when it came to bringing Ginny to life on the big screen, Wright said it was a “little disappointing because there were parts of the character that just didn’t get to come through because there weren’t the scenes to do that. That made me feel a bit anxious or just frustrated, I guess.”
While Ginny, the sister of Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and future wife of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), ended up becoming a prominent supporting character in the book series, her scenes in the films were sparse. Wright even said she had to read Hermione Granger’s lines when auditioning because her character didn’t initially have lines in the first film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
“The actual line I had in the film, which was one line, was given to me on the day, [and director Chris Columbus] was like, ‘I think you need a line,’ which is my ‘good luck’ to Harry,” she recalled.
Since J. K. Rowling’s book series was still being written when the 2001 film came out, Wright didn’t really know what the future entailed for her character when the hit film franchise began. The actress also noted that she never had conversations with producers about where she would like to see her character Ginny go.
“There was just no room for much change in those scripts.” Wright explained. “There were a million executives going through them all. I think what I maybe took, which I don’t take so much to heart now, is I kind of felt that maybe my anxiety was about, oh, I’m going to be seen as badly portraying this character, rather than later realizing that I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do that. So it wasn’t really my fault, exactly.”
Wright added that she understands book fans who were upset when they noticed Ginny’s limited appearances on the screen.
“When fans do share that disappointment, they do it in a way that is like, ‘We know it wasn’t you. We just wanted more of you,’” the actress said. “And that’s the same with every character. If only they could be five-hour-long movies.”
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