Tom Felton as Harry Potter character Draco Malfoy was perfect casting. Despite being a categorically lovely man, embodying a smarmy rich kid seemed to come easy to him. In an anecdote about the casting process on the Harry Potter movies, Felton reveals that it was his arrogance that may have secured him the opportunity.
“Chris Columbus tried this trick, where there’s like 20 kids together and he’d say ‘OK I’m just going to leave you guys for a sec, and we’re going to go talk over here’,” Felton recalls on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And the producers and whatnot would go into one corner and the other guy was still holding the boom mic. Like you know, the huge boom mic over our head, so I knew exactly what was going on.”
As Felton tells it, a girl came up to him to ask him something, his response was particularly Draco. “This little brushy-haired girl came up to me and was like ‘What’s that?’,” he remembers. “I looked at her very arrogantly and said ‘It’s a microphone you idiot, what do you think it is?’ I’m pretty sure they heard that, and I’m pretty sure that helped me get the role of Draco Malfoy.”
That is a very Malfoy way to leave a first impression, we’ll give him that. Naturally, that girl turned out to be Emma Watson, who plays Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter cast. Felton states it wasn’t the “greatest start”, and we’d have to agree.
This wasn’t the only foible in Felton’s process. Famously he hadn’t a clue what Harry Potter was when he started auditioning, and he believes his confidence in not caring as much either way contributed to him being pick. Either way, a great choice, along with Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and the bulk of their co-stars.
If this has you in a wizarding mood, check out our list of the best fantasy movies, and if you want a little evil, here’s our guide to the best vampire movies.