Nick Frost on How To Train Your Dragon, Harry Potter reboot and his special link to Robbie Coltrane

Flying high with roles in Star Wars, Harry Potter and How To Train Your Dragon, Nick Frost opens up on Robbie Coltrane and the giant shoes he has to fill as Hagrid.

Less than a month out from the start of filming for the rebooted Harry Potter series and new Hagrid Nick Frost says he’s already impressed the people he most wanted to impress.

The UK actor, currently starring in the live action remake of How To Train Your Dragon, is taking the role over from the late Robbie Coltrane, who played the part of the kindly bearded giant in the eight Harry Potter films that were released between 2001 and 2011.

Though he never met him in person, Frost says he was a huge fan of Coltrane growing up in the 1970s and 1980s – and apparently the feeling was mutual.

“I loved the fact he was massive and angry and that’s how he began, as a kind of people’s poet in a way,” says Frost over Zoom call from London.

Nick Frost, who will replace Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid in the Harry Potter reboot, were mutual admirers.

“And I love that working-class element he brought to everything he did. I had never met him, but my best friend Danny knows his family very well.

“And apparently his kids phoned my mate Danny to say ‘We are so happy that Nick got the role of Hagrid and that Dad was a really big fan of his’. So that to me kind of closes a book in terms of ‘my job is done’ because I feel like they’re the only people I had to really impress.”

Frost joins established actors including John Lithgow (Professor Dumbledore), Janet McTeer (Professor McGonagall) and Johnny Flynn (Lucius Malfoy) in the hugely anticipated Max series – as well newcomers Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Staunton and Alastair Stout, who play Harry, Hermione and Ron – and he says he’s “excited” to finally get started.

Nick Frost as Gobber in Universal Pictures’ live-action How to Train Your Dragon, written and directed by Dean DeBlois.

“We’re like a month out from shooting and – being a fan and being a massive fan of fantasy – getting to go into a place where they are designing wands and the Sorting Hat and here’s some owls, it’s like ‘this is amazing’,” he says.

“It’s just not lost on me and every time I go in and see a tiny bit more development being done and it’s just amazing.”

With last year’s role voicing a droid in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, his current role as Gobber in How To Train Your Dragon and Harry Potter to come, Frost says “there’s not a theme park alive that I couldn’t just bowl on into free of charge”.

Frost says he based his role of Gobber, voiced by Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson in the three hit animated films, on hardman British actor Ray Winstone – not that he knows it.

“I haven’t told Ray that,” he says with a laugh.

“I’ll let him see the film first and see if he likes it. If he likes it, I’ll say, ‘I based it on you, Ray’.”

Adam Siegel, Nick Frost, Mason Thames, Gerard Butler, Nico Parker and Dean DeBlois at the How to Train Your Dragon Immersive Experience Screening in London this month. Picture: Getty Images

Playing the one-legged, one-armed trainer of dragon-fighters also involved a touch of method acting for Frost.

He was just about to go in for surgery on his bad knee, but director Dean De Blois told him to hold off until shooting had wrapped so he could hobble around for real on his peg leg.

“The arm was great,” Frost adds.

“Every day they they’d knock on the trailer and there’d be an array of five different hands and they’re like ‘well, what do you fancy for the day?’ There was a beer mug and a massive axe or a stone lump or a hammer and it was great getting to pick what I wanted each day.”

How To Train Your Dragon is in cinemas now.

Originally published as Nick Frost on How To Train Your Dragon, Harry Potter reboot and his special link to Robbie Coltrane