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James McAvoy auditioned for the Harry Potter film series, and he nearly had the part, but upon the advice of his agent, the Scottish actor turned it down and instead took a stage role for which he was booed off stage. McAvoy recalled the story in an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast recently.
“I was nearly in Harry Potter. Almost,” he said.
McAvoy auditioned for the role of Tom Riddle, and he was in the running, but the situation surrounding the deal was odd–and it led McAvoy to pass.
“They wanted to put me on a retainer. They offered me something. It was crazy. I’d hardly done any work [at that time]. Me and maybe 10 other actors, they wanted to put us on retainer so they could hold us and keep us to choose later who it would be,” he said. “It was a really strange thing. They offered quite a lot of money for me at the time. It was a ton of money. It was like £40,000 pounds or something like that. I’d done very little work.”
After speaking with his agent, Ruth Young, McAvoy agreed he should not sign on, in part because doing so would have prevented him from doing other work, apparently.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do any work for about seven months, I think it was. I said to my agent, ‘What do you think?'” McAvoy recalled. “She was like, ‘Absolutely not. Don’t do that.'”
McAvoy took her advice and ended up passing on the opportunity to instead take a role in a stage play, Out in the Open, that paid him £275 per week. This wasn’t a total dream job, though, as McAvoy said he was booed off stage during this performance by a “homophobic gentleman.”
McAvoy said he had no regrets about passing on Harry Potter, though. “It was part of the making of me,” he said.
Warner Bros. is producing a new Harry Potter TV series, so might McAvoy look to come back for that? Don’t count on it. “I don’t know if there is anything I’m really missing in terms of what I’ve covered [as an actor],” he said.
J.K. Rowling’s views and comments about the trans community continue to hang over the franchise. The author continues to share her opinions despite alienating herself from some fans of the franchise.
In other Harry Potter news, a remastered edition of The Lego Harry Potter Collection is coming this October, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s ongoing efforts to focus on major franchises like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings in the future. As for McAvoy, he stars in the psychological horror movie Speak No Evil, which is out now in theaters.
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