Fans of the “Harry Potter” movies want to see Tom Felton.
Felton wants to meet fans who crush on things like “Harry Potter.”
Consider the meeting arranged.
Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” films, is going behind the camera to direct a documentary about fandom for BBC Three. The first stop on his pop culture convention tour will be Wizard World Tulsa, scheduled Nov. 7-9 at Cox Business Center. Come see him and you may wind up in documentary footage.
According to a BBC announcement, the documentary will be titled “Tom Felton: Meet the Fanatics.”
While on set in Spain for another project, Felton took part in a phone interview to talk about the documentary and his pending trip to Tulsa.
“The whole thing is based around ‘super fans’ and what makes them such a great part of society,” Felton said. “I’ve been lucky enough to have been going to conventions now since I was 14 years old, and I didn’t really know what to make of them at first. I found them a little strange, and I didn’t know quite how to react.”
Over time, Felton “got it.” He wants to share it.
“I think a lot of people think that it’s OK to be crazy passionate about a football team or a sports team of any kind, but for some reason when they hear that middle-aged men are obsessed with ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Harry Potter,’ that (is perceived) as a weird thing,” he said.
“I want to change the perception of that and show what an amazing, positive world it is and how it completely changes peoples’ lives and brings a lot of happiness to a lot of people. I think people forget sometimes that TV and film and all these things that people are passionate about are more than just pastimes. They give a lot of people a real reason to look forward to every day.”
Felton said one of the amazing things about conventions — and one of the things he wants to show — is how they bring people together. The types of people who flock to cons may not have had an opportunity to meet like-minded folks 20 or 30 years ago.
“Now they have these amazing places where there is no judgment and there are no sort of outside idiots to ridicule them,” he said. “It’s just all about positivity and sharing each other’s passions about it. There are a lot of people I have met who have said they met their best friend or their wife or their partner at one of these cons, and that’s part of the reason why we want to highlight all of this positive stuff.”
Questions Felton will attempt to answer: What separates a fan from a super fan? What makes people go from passionate to obsessive — and why is that a good thing and not a bad thing? Why does the rest of the world attach a stigma to con-goers?
Felton said he knows some fans take things to extremes, but passions are something that should be celebrated.
“There are people that spend hundreds of hours designing a costume or writing their own science fiction or getting together and starting clubs,” he said.
“That should be a world that people want to be part of. … Part of (the resistance is others) don’t understand and they have never had an insight to be that passionate about something. I know my attitude towards it was I didn’t really understand it at first and then, after a couple of cons, I saw, wow, if I was half as passionate as some of these guys are about shows that haven’t aired for 10 years, I would be having a very happy time.”
Felton said Wizard World Tulsa and a convention in the U.K. are the only cons he will attend for documentary purposes. The documentary won’t be con-centric. It will be people-centric.
“I think it’s a world that has evolved a hell of a lot over the last 10 years, even since I have been doing it,” he said, adding that he intends to talk with celebrities and actor friends to get their perspective on fan culture.
credit: TULSA WORLD
