RUPERT GRINT MOVES FROM RON TO CON IN ‘SNATCH’
TV adaptation of 2000 cult-classic film has the ‘Potter’ actor in another eccentric role
It’s been nearly six years since Rupert Grint starred in the final film of the
Harry Potter franchise, but he’s not quite finished playing fantastical J.K. Rowling-style characters.
In his new role on Snatch, a TV adaptation of Guy Richie’s 2000 film, Grint plays the adorably bumbling con man Charlie Cavendish Scott, a cross between Ron Weasley’s impish
Potter siblings Fred and George, and Brad Pitt’s colorfully-dressed character from Richie’s original.
The 10-episode series, released on Sony’s Crackle streaming service Thursday, pays homage to Richie’s cult classic while developing its own set of next-generation gangsters, also featuring Luke Pasqualino ( The Musketeers), Ed Westwick ( Gossip Girl) and Dougray Scott ( Hemlock Grove). Grint, 28, also signed on as an executive producer, though he “didn’t throw my weight around — I wasn’t very producer-y,” he joked.
“I was a huge fan of the original film. ... I was probably way too young,” he said. “But it stayed with me.” Snatch also was the first TV project for executive producer Alex De Rakoff, whose writing and directing credits include Dead Man Running and Grand Theft Auto 2.
Developing a fast-paced TV show with overlapping story lines wasn’t easy for the TV rookies, a process that De Rakoff called a “nightmare.”
“We’re writing stuff as we go, so it’s a huge jigsaw puzzle,” he said at the show’s premiere event this week. Grint agreed. “We were literally filming episodes and we didn’t know how they would end. And that’s the challenge, to track your character’s arc, when you have no idea where it could go.”
Many fans still have trouble separating Rupert Grint from Ron Weasley, the wizard he played in the beloved Potter franchise alongside co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson.
Describing Snatch as a tale of “young people out of their depth,” Grint says his acting past creates a “strange distance” from his peers, to which his
Potter co-stars can really relate.
“It was a very unique childhood,” he said. “I don’t think a lot of people, apart from me, Dan and Emma, really understand what that was like. It was very strange, we lived in this kind of weird bubble.”
While Grint “always felt really grateful” for his Potter experience, he thought he might quit acting when the series ended.
“After I finished the last Potter films, it took me a while to adjust,” he said. “It was quite an overwhelming feeling of, ‘What the hell?’ where a huge part of my life came to a sudden end. So it took me a while to really fall in love with acting again. I kinda did think, ‘ Do I really want to continue this?’ ”
Grint re-established his footing through a series of eccentric roles, playing punk-rock guitarist Cheetah Chrome in 2013’s CBGB and starring alongside Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in his Broadway debut, the 2014 comedy It’s Only a Play. “I do like bold characters — I find it easier to escape into those,” he said.
And the Snatch set had an abundance of eccentric types. When the series filmed gritty boxing scenes in Manchester, England, Grint became a target for the colorful locals who appeared on-screen as extras.
“We were doing this scene for the boxing match, and there was a lot of extras watching, and a few were quite interesting,” he says. “I remember this lady came up to me — I was having a coffee off-set — and she wanted my bank details so she could wire 5,000 pounds to her account, and she would give me the cash.
“I didn’t do it.”
“We’re writing stuff as we go, so it’s a huge jigsaw puzzle.” Alex De Rakoff, Snatch executive producer, says of the show