15

TRANSFIGURATION TROUBLES

or

MAGGIE AND THE MILLIPEDE

Filming the Harry Potter films required the use of live animals. Owls, rats, dogs, snakes, you name it. There was a special holding area at Leavesden Studios where the animals were kept. I’m a dog lover, so I fondly remember the half dozen or so dogs that were there to play Fang, Hagrid’s pet. They were huge, lumbering animals half the size of a horse, and you couldn’t get too close: one shake of those enormous jowls and you’d be covered in a thick layer of doggie slobber. In any case, the animals weren’t there to be petted and prodded and poked. On screen you might see Harry quietly holding an owl, but behind the camera there’s likely to be a hundred people, with lights and sound effects. It’s not easy to get an animal to do what you want it to do with all that commotion going on.

So there was a method. The trainers brought the animals on to the set hours before the children, the rest of the cast or even the crew were invited on. They rehearsed what they were supposed to do tirelessly: the owl that drops off a letter (or a howler) would have been practising for hours before the set became live. No matter how well rehearsed it is, however, when the animals do come on to a live set, and there are hundreds of kids talking, lights flashing, smoke machines, fire effects and all sorts of other distractions, they are very likely to be distracted. So we were taught very early on that when animals are around, you must be calm around them.

Over the years, as the films became bigger, so did the animal holding area. By the end there were hundreds of fantastic beasts at Leavesden, and everyone enjoyed working with them. But you know what they say about working with children and animals. I don’t doubt that Dame Maggie Smith found herself reflecting on that old maxim while we were filming Chamber of Secrets.

Dame Maggie has a commanding presence. I was lucky enough to get to know her just as Maggie before I really understood what a legend she is. Like Professor McGonagall herself, Maggie exudes a quiet, calm authority, and she’s always hiding a wry smile. And like Alan Rickman she has the ability to be really quite stern while also remaining incredibly patient. It’s a useful quality when you have a film set full of misbehaving kids who have no real idea who you are, no concept of the esteem in which you’re held. And I’m sorry to say that I tested that patience somewhat more than I should have in the early days.

The scene was Professor McGonagall’s Transfiguration lesson. The students were sitting at old-fashioned sloping school desks, the kind with the lid that opens up, and all around the room were cages with animals in them. Think snakes, monkeys, toucans and even a rather ill-mannered baboon. The baboon in question was—how can one put this?—unaware of the niceties of social interaction and set etiquette, and in particular he was unaware of what behaviour it is appropriate to exhibit in front of a bunch of kids. Which is my roundabout way of saying that we had to cope with the distracting intrusion of a self-pleasuring primate during the filming of the scene. There was many a take that had to be discarded because of a wanking baboon in the background. They had to move the poor creature several times to stop his vigorous pastime ruining the shot, and you can imagine the chaos that ensued each time one of us kids saw what was happening out of the corner of our eye and shouted, “Oh my God, look at the baboon!”

For the scene, each child was individually given an animal. Mine was a gecko on a little branch. The animal guys had tied a length of fishing twine to its body to stop it scurrying away, and I was told in no uncertain terms not to grab it by its tail. Apparently a gecko’s super power is that it can shed its tail and grow a new one, so if you hold it there’s a good chance the tail will come off in your hand. He was a fairly docile little chap. He sat on his branch, good as gold, and I just about resisted the urge to test out his super power. Like the gecko, most of the animals distributed around the class were perfectly chilled. (More chilled than the baboon, at least.) There was a mellow shrew and some pretty decent-sized but well-behaved insects.

And then there was Josh Herdman’s millipede.

The millipede was easily as thick as my thumb and as long as my forearm. It had a billion legs and seemed to be incapable of not moving. It wriggled and squirmed around the sloping desk next to me, the polar opposite of my immobile gecko. It was fascinating to watch, and irresistible to poke. Any ordinary school kid would have used a pencil for that purpose, but we had better tools to hand. We had wands! In the spirit of scientific inquiry, we (gently) poked and prodded that poor millipede, and we learned something astonishing. Poke it enough, and it will roll up, hedgehog-like, into a little Cumberland sausage shape. And when that happened, it would slide

The hilarity this sliding millipede caused me and Josh was off the scale. With each poke, sausage and slide we’d completely corpse.

Normally, when somebody corpsed on set, it was funny. Chris Columbus had almost infinite patience, and you can hardly take pains to create a fun filming environment and then give people grief for having a laugh. But it can’t be constant hilarity. There comes a point where you have to get some footage in the can. And so Columbus came up with a system to deal with eventualities such as this. Any time one of us disturbed a take, we were given a red card. A red card meant you had to put ten pounds into a bag and at the end of the shoot, all the money was donated to charity. It was a good plan to keep us on the straight and narrow, but it didn’t always work. Rupert Grint was one of the worst offenders. I believe he put in over £2,500 during the first two films alone, such was his inability to control himself when the giggles hit. It certainly didn’t work on this occasion. Each time the call of “Action!” rang out, Josh or I would poke the millipede in an attempt to keep it on its mark. Yet again it would slide

And we’d be in pieces.

“Cut!”

Red cards were issued. Apologies were made. Josh and I solemnly swore that we’d no longer be up to no good. But then, as soon as we heard the word “Action!,” we were helpless with laughter again. One of us would snigger and that would set the other off. Even if we didn’t hear each other, or look at each other, the bloody millipede would slide down the table and we’d be doubled over yet again.

“Cut!”

We were taken to one side and given a talking-to. “Listen boys, you’re wasting our time, you’re wasting your time and most of all you’re wasting Dame Maggie Smith’s time. It’s not respectful and we’ll remove you from the set if you think this is all just a joke. Is that what we need to do?”

We shook our heads. We knew this was a terrible show of form. We desperately wanted to demonstrate that we were professionals. We returned to our places, chastened and determined to keep our involuntary fits of laughter under control. We focused on Dame Maggie, patiently austere at the head of the class. Josh and I were as serious as we could be.

“Action!”

Corpse.

“CUT!”

It was no good. We didn’t want to laugh but we were incapable of stopping ourselves. We could sense each other’s smirks. It was like being brutally tickled—painful, and yet we couldn’t stop laughing. Chris Columbus and the rest of the crew were beyond a little frustrated at this point. How the hell were they going to shoot this scene when the two dumb Slytherins kept mucking things up for them, all because of a slippery millipede?

In the end, they took the animals away. Each scene is filmed from various angles and they decided that, since they principally needed shots of Maggie, and our role was to help her performance, we could ditch the menagerie. So that’s what happened, all because of Josh and my mismanagement of the millipede.

I felt mortified about my behaviour and so I went up to Maggie afterwards and apologised. “I’m so sorry, Maggie, I don’t know what came over me. It won’t happen again…” She kindly waved my apology away. I suppose that, after several decades of mastering her art, she was hardly likely to be derailed by a couple of teenagers pissing about with wands and a millipede in her eye line. An actor of her experience is near bulletproof in that regard. And I don’t think my behaviour compromised our relationship. On set she was stern but kind—much like McGonagall herself. Off set, at premieres and events, she was always incredibly friendly and accommodating. I remember my parents being desperate to meet her and her being very cool about it. All in all, a true national treasure. Someone to look up to. And that’s coming from a Slytherin.

From time to time, it should be said, I got as good as I gave. In Goblet of Fire, there is a scene where Mad Eye Moody turns Draco into a ferret and then, having been told off by McGonagall, back into Draco. The script made it quite clear that, when re-transfigured into human form, Draco should be stark bollock naked as he runs, humiliated, across a crowded courtyard. I didn’t give it much thought, beyond making the occasional gag that they might not have a camera lens wide enough. But as the moment arrived to film the scene, and they handed me a see-through thong that made me rather hanker after my Snowman Three costume, the reality of the situation suddenly dawned on me. “We’re really going to do this?” I asked, thong in hand, a hundred teenage extras looking on.

“We’re really going to do this.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

I looked at the skimpy G-string. I looked at the camera crew. I looked at the extras and the ADs and the other cast members. And it was only when a few of them started sniggering that I realised the bastards had been winding me up the whole time. I’d been the butt of their joke, made to look a bit of an arse, but thankfully my derrière remained covered and my modesty preserved.