Matthew Lewis said that while people still call him ‘Neville Longbottom,’ he finds it a little ‘frustrating’ but ultimately very helpful and uncomfortable. Harry Potter.
When the star, who appeared in all eight episodes of the iconic fantasy franchise, promoted his new project All Creatures Great and Small, he told me it is disheartening if people tend to take away all the work he has done between Deathly Hallows – the second part (which came out in 2011) and now.
To quote the star, he said, “Sometimes when people sort of say, Oh, he’s’ — for example I’m doing this show at the minute; it’s on PBS, and like a lot of the headlines are, He’s no longer Neville Longbottom anymore. It’s like, I haven’t been that for ten years.”
The 31-year-old actor continued his statement and said, “I have done things that have been so wildly different. Like, I’ve been in dramas that have won BAFTAs and done all of this kind of stuff. I’m not bragging; it’s just like I’ve done all this stuff, and like ten years later, it’s still like people are making the claim I’ve sort of jumped from Harry Potter into this and have completely ignored the journey it’s taken; to get there.”
In titles such as Ripper Street, Happy Valley and Me Before you, Lewis acknowledged that people who refer to him as “Harry Potter’s boy” often made him second-rate his career, as it seems he’s not standing up to the Daniel Radcliffe saga anywhere.
“That can be frustrating – not that I’m frustrated with anything to do with Harry Potter. It’s like you have that voice in your head that goes, ‘Hey, you know all that work you did for the past ten years, No one f**cking saw it. No one cares.’ They still think this is the first job you’ve done since Harry Potter,” he added.
The actor has done a good amount of work in the past, and the audience who has seen him in other movies can agree that he can do much more.
