Well, folks, it’s time to play catch-up with all those interviews our lovely Tom has been giving lately during his promotional tour for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This post is devoted exclusively to interviews given by Tom at various press junkets throughout the past week. We will have a post devoted exclusively to what other’s have said about the brilliance of Tom in a few days.
During a week of traveling hell,Tom started out his sojourn to North America by visiting Canada for a press junket….
In The Intelligencer and The Toronto Sun, and the Edmonton Sun, where Tom is decribed as “tall and sunny,” Tom discusses acting, his “regular beatings” from his older brothers, fishing, and his music.
An excerpt:
These days, Felton has added singer/songwriter to his list of accomplishments. (You can see for yourself at youtube.com/user/feltbeats).
He says, modestly, “I do like to kill time with a bit of the one-man-band action. Sometime around the fifth Potter movie I brought a guitar into the studio. I’m self-taught. Anyway, I shared it online, and it seems to have had quite a good reception.”
Felton, who is the youngest of four boys — “You get regular beatings,” he says, deadpan. “And you never get a spot on the couch,” — says his grandfather vets his lyrics.
“He makes sure they’re proper English. He knows better ways of phrasing than I do.” Speaking of his family with obvious affection, Felton says that his grandfather was his chaperone during the filming of the second Harry Potter movie. “The director saw him — he’s got a sort of Charles Darwin beard, my grandpa — and asked him to be in the film. You can see him in the movie, sitting at the wizard’s bench with Dumbledore,” says Felton, with obvious affection. “He came to chaperone and left with a job.”
In an interview he gave with The Toronto Star, Tom discussed his ever present blonde hair and what it’s like watching himself grow up with it.
“I hate to spoil the illusion, but yes, I am not a natural whitehead,” Felton laughs. “Lots of hair dyeing over the next year.”
Felton muses that the cast’s onscreen maturation is probably a big part of the movies’ appeal. Does he smile when he sees how they’ve all changed? “It doesn’t make me smile; it makes me laugh. It’s so funny,” he says. “I love seeing us through the years. We were all so round in the face.
“If they had changed the cast, it would have made the franchise not as sustainable in terms of picking up steam,” Felton adds. “I think the fact they’re using the same people makes the fans feel like they are part of the same franchise. It’s not like Bond, where they can keep swapping Potters around and hope for the best.”
In another article from the same website, they share a humorous, yet quite revealing little quote from Tom concerning a biopic he would love to make someday.
“I could easily step into Keith Richards. Why not?” the 21-year-old told the Toronto Star with a grin during an interview yesterday.
“I’d just have to grow my hair a bit and have a bottle of whisky every day, but I’m sure I could manage it,” the English actor added with a laugh.
For the quintessential Canada.com, Tom discusses his nervousness for the 6th film in the Harry Potter series, and how he worked with director David Yates to overcome it.
“Actually, I was very nervous about that initially,” he said. “But David (Yates) brought me in two or three times before we started filming and we worked on a few things. He was very complimentary so when we started it fuelled me and it was a great deal easier than I expected.”
In a CanMag.com interview, Tom re-iterates his take on the sixth film and the help he received from Yates, only with slightly more colorful language.
“I was terrified before starting the film, about approaching him in this whole new light. He’s always been very two-dimensional in previous years, and we had to take a new angle with it. But [director] David [Yates] was very clear and concise with this ghost like image, with this sort of glaze over his eyes, constantly. He did some rehearsals with Michael [Gambon] and Alan [Rickman], which I was sh*tting myself, massively before doing.”
As there are undoubtedly more interviews Tom gave from the great north, we now head further south towards the ocean where Tom was inundated with press junkets galore in first New York, and then New Jersey.
One thing Tom was definitely happy about concerning the filming of HBP had to do with all that snogging, as he tells The New York Observer.
[Tom] was “thrilled” that he did not have a kissing scene of his own, unlike his co-stars. “I heard it was a bit awkward among old friends,” he said.
Another happy aspect of HP6 for Tom was that he got to play the “solemn villain.” According to Digital Spy and Blockbuster.com:
“Cold eyes, I’ve been told. A pretty pasty face. I think it’s quite iconic, Draco, in the way he looks.
“I think to be evil, you need an iconic look. Like a James Bond villain, with the scar or a cat. Something like that definitely helps.”
Felton recently told DS that he enjoyed playing the role of the “solemn villain” in the Harry Potter series and was upset to be filming the last movies.
In the Latino Review, Tom has a lengthy interview with his fellow co-stars, and answers the question “has it really set in for you guys that this is all truly ending?”
“Yeah. I don’t think when they finish filming that that’ll be the end of us portraying the characters. I think there will always be a little bit of that inside of us that will remain, at least, and so to speak. But yeah, I’m certainly enjoying it rather than looking ahead and getting a bit sad about it. I’m going to make the most out of it and certainly cry my eyes out when it’s finished.”
Journey into the future or not, Tom still had to deal with living in a parallel world to his character, Draco Malfoy. He told NewJersey.com over the phone:
It’s definitely presented some issues, but I’ve always considered myself lucky that my character looks very different from what I look like in real life. I spend six weeks of a year with long, blond hair and a face as pale as a ghost. I had a group of core friends before I started the films, and they’re still my best friends now.
Speaking of friends, the news has been full of articles about his friendly relationship with co-star Daniel Radcliffe. In both the Metro and the Press Association, both young men lament on attending the premiere in New York. Why? Because they were missing the England vs. Australia first round cricket match. Both men are avid fans of the “leather on willow” and were quite upset about missing the game.
“When Dan and I were told of the New York premiere, we said, ‘Are you joking? You know what’s happening on that day’.”
Tom added that he and Daniel were on the look out for a place to watch the following day’s play in the City that doesn’t sleep nor understand the finer points of cricket.
In a lengthy interview with ComingSoon, Tom remarks on his real life friendship with Daniel Radcliffe, and why it’s not just cricket that made them pals.
Q: Your character is constantly at odds with Harry. So what is your real interaction like with Daniel [Radcliffe]?
Felton: “Young Daniel. Very well. We’ve obviously known each other now for many years. It’s quite strange because as much as we’ve grown up together we also haven’t because we have sort of four or five months in between films and every time we come back we’re both slightly more mature and slightly into different things and so forth. It’s useful that we’re both great cricket appreciators. We can wind away the hours talking about cricket which I’m sure doesn’t interest you at all, but that’s generally the topic of conversation between the two of us and obviously we’re both keen on films and various other bits and music as well. I’m not sure that we’re both into the same music, but we’re both very passionate about music. So we have enough in common to remain a healthy friendship.”
Good thing they have a healthy friends-only relationship, as quite a few fans hope and dream otherwise. The Daily Express, Ok! Magazine, New! Magazine, and Digital Spy relate an interview Tom gave with GQ Magazine [Note: this is from the upcoming August issue] about some drawings fans have mistaken for real concerning the two young men.
The 21-year-old added that he has received digitally enhanced pictures of himself in provocative positions with other cast members, saying: “Oh God, I saw this crude picture. All I’ll say is that Daniel and I were never in that bed.
“Shame on whoever did that on Photoshop, it’s caused me hell. My brother has it on his phone as a screensaver.”
[Note: only Google if you are of age in your home country.]
And from the New York Post, Tom and Dan each expounds on the subject of fan gifts, and Tom includes an anecdote on someone wanting to adopt him.
“One guy wanted to adopt me,” Tom tells British GQ. “He’d legally changed his named to Lucius Malfoy and wanted to be a happy family.” Needless to say, Tom didn’t accept.
For even more interviews from Tom from the past week, please check out the links below. Some of them are quite long and feature interviews from fellow cast-mates Dan Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, and Bonnie Wright.
SheKnows.com
Buzzine.com
Teen Hollywood
About.com
STV.com
Did we miss any? Let us know!
