Harry Potter
When describing your day job as a magazine journalist to today’s adolescents, there are few anecdotes that raise even a glimmer of approbation. Jumping in puddles with Justin Timberlake? Wrong Justin. Sunbathing with Kate Winslet? Booooring. Watching Ken Loach direct? Does he even have a YouTube channel? Going on the set of Harry
Potter with Daniel Radcliffe? Now we’re talking. Of course, such was the security around the filming of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 that I wasn’t allowed to describe what I saw. However, I’m going to risk Warner Bros’ retroactive wrath by revealing that the actor who played Draco Malfoy was actually a very nice bloke and that it was clear some kind of magic was happening.
Since Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, the character has cast a spell that cannot be broken. His creator JK Rowling now has a net worth estimated at more than $1bn. The main novel and film series may have ended, but the spin-off books and movies and the plays and the theme parks and the bus tours and the collectors’ edition wands will probably be churned out forever.
And so it has come to pass that this scrawny, bespectacled, boy wizard projects more about the British man to the wider world than any debonair secret agent ever has: an unprepossessing, milk-fed geek who somehow holds his own against superior forces through a mixture of ingenuity, hard graft and high-powered backers, and who nurtures a Messiah complex that isn’t nearly as well-disguised as he thinks it is.