The Harry Potter franchise is renowned for many things, like magical creatures, great characters, and awe-inspiring world building. Those things don’t come easy, and it’s all down to the little details that bring that magic to life in the fantasy movie series. That’s certainly the case when it comes to the costume design too, after it was revealed that the crew spent a whole week making ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody’s coat look convincingly worn.
The epic kids movies got so much right, and it was obviously a big team effort to make the Harry Potter movies so successful. Every year at Hogwarts, the school got a new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor, meaning the crew had to be on top of their game with each new adventure movie to give these Harry Potter characters a distinctive and memorable look.
In an article featured on IGN back in 2012, costume designer Jany Temime recalled how important it was to get ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody’s appearance perfect, including the process of making his signature coat look like it had seen some things in its time.
Moody, played by Brendan Gleeson in the Harry Potter cast, was perhaps best known for the crazy blue eye strapped to his head, but his whole wardrobe was crucial in bringing this character to life in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
“Moody is a warrior. The man has no house, no home. He literally lives in his coat,” Temime said. “We had a team of people who spent a week aging and distressing the coat to give it a lifetime’s worth of wear.”
Sounds like quite the undertaking, but one which was most definitely worth it, as Moody was ultimately one of the best characters in the family movie franchise.
Apparently, Moody’s costume was initially inspired by the kind of clothes you’d see in Spaghetti Western movies. That figures, given Gleeson’s own description of his character as “a gunslinger with a wand.”