J.K Rowling? 'No one has done more to bring joy to so many generations'

As Draco Malfoy, Tom Felton was the boy villain of the Harry Potter films. He reveals why he won’t join the attacks on the books’ author

As Draco Malfoy, Tom Felton was the boy villain of the Harry Potter films. He reveals why he won’t join the attacks on the books’ author

Sitting in a busy cafe behind Harry Potter’s favourite railway station, King’s Cross, Tom Felton looks different enough from Draco Malfoy that at first I fail to recognise him. Felton reverted to his natural sandy hair colour after he finished making the eight films that required weekly top-ups of peroxide. The trimmed beard, gold-rimmed glasses, cream cardigan and light tan are those of a 35-year-old actor who lived for several years in Los Angeles. So it seems only sensible to agree to his thoughtful suggestion that we take an outside table so I can record our conversation in a less rackety space. It’s not as though anyone is going to bother us.

How wrong can you be? First our waiter arrives, flabbergasted, asking if it’s really him. “I paid him 20 quid to do that,” Felton jokes, but the self-deprecation is exposed a few minutes later when two men in their twenties sidle up to ask for a selfie. Felton smilingly complies in a way that’s practised but friendly. He says he can’t remember a day since the films started coming out that this hasn’t happened at least once or twice. People are almost always polite and kind. “So I don’t see that as a bad thing to have in my life.”

Work has kept coming for Felton since his ten-year Potter stint ended in 2011, when he was in his early twenties. However, he knows that he wouldn’t have written his new memoir, the highly readable Beyond the Wand, or have starred in his first West End production this summer, the ghost play 2:22, without it. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” Not that it’s always plain sailing. He was called the “broomstick prick for a while at secondary school”; he made the news this summer after a publicist connected to the 25th anniversary celebrations for the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, stepped in to stop a Sky News reporter asking about the absence of the series’s creator, JK Rowling.

Felton’s co-stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson have set themselves in opposition to Rowling’s recent stance on gender politics. Felton states in his book that he kept and framed a note from Rowling after she wrote to compliment him on his performance in the sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. He mentions her only three times in his book, he says, simply because he didn’t have much contact with her.

Emma Watson And Tom Felton in 2003. Photo by Brian Rasic/Getty Images

“I couldn’t speak for what others have said or what she said, to be completely honest, but I’m often reminded, attending Comic Cons [fantasy conventions] in particular, that no one has single-handedly done more for bringing joy to so many different generations and walks of life. I’m constantly reminded of her positive work in that field and as a person. I’ve only had a handful of meetings with her but she has always been lovely. So I’m very grateful for that.

“I’m pro. I’m pro choice. I’m pro life. I’m pro discussion. I’m pro love. I don’t tend to pick sides. I won’t talk specifics but I enjoy reminding myself and others that a lot of my good friends have ways of life or personal decisions that I don’t necessarily agree with. We should enjoy celebrating each other’s differences.”

So, yes, Felton is gentler, more diplomatic, altogether less dastardly than Draco Malfoy. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s not just little kids who are wrongfooted when he turns out to be “quite a nice chap” in real life. It gives him a low bar to exceed, he says with a chuckle. And it was telling stories about himself at Comic Cons that prompted him to start jotting some of them down. Later, as he moved to London from Los Angeles when the pandemic took grip, and he felt himself isolated from too many friends and family, he started turning those jottings into a book.

He loved his stage job this summer and wants to do more theatre but notes how different it is from screen work: he hadn’t done any of it since playing a snowman and a tree at drama club at Fetcham Village Hall in Surrey when he was seven. His grandfather had funded him and his three older brothers to go to a private prep school, Cranmore School in West Horsley, after which they went to the local comprehensive, Howard of Effingham School. By then he already had his job on Potter, after early successes in the films The Borrowers and Anna and the King. As the youngest of four rambunctious boys, he was used to standing his ground. So when he went to the auditions for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, he had just the sort of cockiness that the director wanted for Draco.

“Everyone else there, as I recall, was fans of the book. I was the only one who had no idea what this story about the boy under the cupboard was about and probably thought it was a bit uncool too. Because of my older brothers I was 12 going on 21.”

He suggests that Radcliffe, Watson and Grint were quite close in real life to their ideas of Harry, Hermione and Ron. Similarly, although Felton now is polite and charming with refined diction, he was enough of a rebel at the time to do things like smuggling a skateboard on to the set even though he was forbidden to do so for fear of injury. He tells in the book of once getting caught smoking dope by the police; of getting banned for life from HMV after a clumsy attempt to impress his friends by stealing a DVD. He wasn’t self-destructive, he says, he just didn’t define himself by his acting.

“Back then I didn’t preface any decision with: ‘How is this going to affect my career?’ My mum would have been pissed off. That’s about it. I certainly didn’t imagine my life would have been over.” As a supporting character, he spent enough time in the real world, he says, that it never took over his whole life like it might have done for the principals. The films, he writes, came fifth in his teen life behind “fishing, music, cars and friends”.

And though they were big-budget affairs from the off, he insists nobody knew quite how huge and persistent their success would be. “People think we signed up to an eight-film deal, but that was never the case. It was just one after the next. I certainly expected them to replace us with half-decent actors at some point.”

J.K Rowling. Photo by Bruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

Felton remembers keeping his composure for his final shoot on the film, a low-key event with the second unit. He then cried all the way home in his car, but tried to hide his tears from his driver. He laughs at the thought. “I’m quite an emotional chap, to be fair. I only have to watch the news just to start blubbing sometimes.”

After Potter he got a job straight away on a Hollywood blockbuster: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Yet although he relocated to Los Angeles, his big (second) break didn’t lead to the stardom he briefly imagined. “It is a process of relentless rejection. I always say to any young actor now that you’re right for maybe one out of 100 roles, which means welcoming 99 ‘nos’ as quickly as possible.” Work came, though: he appeared in films including Risen (with Joseph Fiennes) and A United Kingdom (with David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike). He had recurring roles in the TV series Murder in the First, The Flash and Origin.

However, after he started drinking - he never went off the rails, he says, but he did change - his agents staged an intervention and insisted he go to rehab. Ever the rebel, he walked out of the first rehab centre but went to another, made some big changes such as ending his long-term relationship with Jade Olivia, whom he had met when she was a stunt assistant on the Potter films. He spent a couple of years living in Venice Beach. He realised that he, like two of his brothers, suffers from depression. He got a dog, Willow, now four, and took twice-daily swims in the sea.

Now he lives in north London. He won’t say whether he is in a relationship, but he values his hobbies: walking Willow, seeing friends, playing music. He says financially he still needs to work, and in any case he wants to keep busy so he can do his charity work. And that helps him as much as he helps anyone else, he says. “The ultimate, game-changing element for me in the past few years has been helping others.” He did some volunteering for a food truck for the homeless in Venice Beach as part of his second stint in rehab and found he got more out of it than he put in."It’s a relatively small gesture. It took two hours of my entire week. But it lifted my spirits for the rest of the week.”

Beyond the Wand by Tom Felton.

He has several films ready to come out, and enjoyed helping to produce one of them, Canyon Del Muerto, a historical drama about the American archaeologist Ann Axtell Morris in which he plays her husband, Earl, reputedly an inspiration for Indiana Jones. He knows to be proud of Potter, to be glad of the opportunities it gives him, but not to rely on it for his sense of self-worth. Or, indeed, to rely on any work for that. “You can’t, otherwise the rejection would be too painful. Playing my keyboards and guitar is great: they don’t care who you are or what you do. My dog doesn’t care what job I do, she just wants to be walked. So, yeah, there are things that give me value beyond what people think of me. Increasingly I try to remind myself that that’s not what is important in life."

Beyond the Wand, by Tom Felton, is published by Ebury on Thursday.