21

ALAN RICKMAN’S EARLOBES

or

DON’T TREAD ON MY F*CKING CLOAK!

It’s the sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Snape has just killed Dumbledore. He, Draco, Bellatrix and an assortment of Death Eaters are marching through the Great Hall as they flee Hogwarts. We’re talking high stakes.

David Yates, the director, has a vision: a V-shaped formation, Snape at the head, the rest of us fanned out behind him like bowling pins, or geese, as we storm down the aisle. Helena Bonham Carter has different ideas. She wants to dance along one of the long tables, kicking everything off, screaming and laughing maniacally. It’s characteristically brilliant: Bellatrix comes across as being entirely unhinged. But we’re having trouble nailing the shot for the rest of us. We do a couple of takes, sweeping quickly down the Great Hall with the camera team walking backwards in front of us. But it’s not right. Alan Rickman is perfectly in focus, but the rest of us are a bit of a blur. We’re too far behind him, that’s the problem. David Yates directs us that we need to be closer to Alan.

From the very beginning, Alan Rickman had certain suggestions about Snape’s costume. Snape would, he felt, have extremely long, flowing robes. These were to include a long cloak that draped along the ground behind him as he walked, like the train of a wedding dress. Once David had given us this new direction, Alan turned to the rest of us just before the cameras were about to roll. His eyes were narrow. His lips were thin. One eyebrow was ever so slightly raised. Any Hogwarts student, given the full force of that Snape-like stare, would have had legs of jelly. And I’m not going to lie, even we actors had an uncomfortable moment as we waited for him to say something. He spoke like Snape, each word distinct, heavy with meaning and punctuated by a long, agonising pause.

“Don’t…”

Silence. We glanced sidelong at each other. We wondered, Don’t what?

“Step…”

We looked down at our feet. Then we looked up at Alan again.

“On… my… fucking…”

We blinked. We blinked again.

“Cloak.”

We gave a nervous laugh, but Alan wasn’t laughing. He gave each of us a chilly stare, then he spun round, his cloak billowing bat-like behind him. Released from his glare, we Death Eaters looked at each other and one of us mouthed: “Is he serious?” He was. Deadly serious. We were, on no account, to step on his fucking cloak.

We go for another take, bunched up closer this time. And who is it that’s walking directly behind Snape? It’s Draco, of course, and his feet will be just inches away from the trailing hem of the cloak as they march urgently through the Great Hall. The director gives us our instructions. “Chins up!” he says. “Don’t look down. We need to see your faces!”

Which means we can’t keep a careful eye on the hem of Alan’s cloak. So I give myself a good talking-to as we prepare for the take. Don’t tread on the cloak. Don’t tread on the cloak. Don’t tread on the…

“Action!”

Alan marches forwards. The rest of us follow.

One step…

Two steps…

Three steps…

Now, Alan’s cloak hung from his shoulders by means of a loop that went around his neck. When I inevitably stepped on the hem of his cloak, we’d barely reached the halfway point of the Great Hall. His head jerked back. For an awful moment I thought he was going to lose his balance. His strangled scream rang out around the set.

“Aaaargh!”

“Cut!”

Silence.

I gingerly moved my foot off the hem of the cloak. Alan turned. Slowly. I gave him my most apologetic smile.

“Sorry Alan,” I squeaked.

Alan said nothing.

“I… I really didn’t mean to do that,” I stuttered.

Alan said nothing again. He turned his back on me. Shit, I thought. I’ve really pissed him off.

A member of the crew shouted: “Going again!” We returned sheepishly to our starting positions. I gave myself another talking to. For fuck’s sake, Felton. Don’t tread on the cloak. Don’t tread on the cloak. Don’t tread on the…

“Action!”

This time round, you’d better believe I was making teeny-tiny steps behind Alan as the convoy of Death Eaters attempted their procession yet again. I made one teeny-tiny step…

Two teeny-tiny steps…

Three teeny-tiny steps…

“AAAARGH!”

This time it was worse. Alan’s whole body juddered backwards and he helicoptered his arms to keep his balance.

“CUT!”

Horrified, I looked down at my feet. Surely I couldn’t have stepped on the hem again. To my eternal relief, I hadn’t. One of my death-eating colleagues had overstepped the mark this time. And Alan was fuming.

“I’m not…”

He announced.

“Fucking…”

He declared.

“Doing… this… again!”

After some negotiation from the director, Alan agreed to give it one last try. The Death Eaters and I shared a glance of panic, but thankfully on the third take, no one stepped on his fucking cloak. However, if you think Snape looks a little strangled in that scene, now you know why.

In the following scene, Snape and the Death Eaters escape to the castle grounds. Hagrid’s hut is set on fire. Harry and Snape do battle before Snape reveals that he is the Half-Blood Prince.

They’d built this exterior set at Leavesden: a massive hill, like a football pitch on a slant. We shot the scene at night. Helena was somewhere in the background being crazy, doing her dancing maniac bit having been mainlining espressos all night. Alan and I were standing in the middle of the field, waiting for Daniel to arrive.

There is a moment, when you’re setting up a scene, that can sometimes be awkward. They’ll be lining everything up and they’ll put the actors in particular positions, and the actors will be required to stare at each other so that they can light the scene correctly. And then, between takes, while they’re reviewing what they’ve just captured, it’s the same deal: you’re standing there like a lemon, patiently waiting for the call to go again. It’s not always completely comfortable, gazing into the eyes of a person you don’t necessarily know that well. I tend to use the earlobe trick: I’ll stare at my colleague’s earlobe instead of their eyes, which somehow eases the awkwardness and saves the moment for when the camera is rolling.

That evening, I found myself staring at Alan Rickman’s earlobes. We’d done a take and were waiting for the director to review it. It seemed to be dragging on, and Alan and I were enshrouded by a long, awkward silence. At least, it was awkward for me. I always had the impression that Alan himself was never uncomfortable with silence. Silence, in fact, was his preferred state of being. And although by this point I’d spent years on set with him, I was still rather wary of the man. It hadn’t helped that I’d stepped on his fucking cloak.

However, as we stood in the cold night air, I felt a typically British need to fill the silence. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but somehow it was. I eventually plucked up the courage to say, “How’s it going then, Alan? You alright? Feeling okay?”

Five long, silent seconds passed. Ten longer silent seconds passed. I started to wonder if he’d even heard me. Should I repeat my question? But then he slowly turned his head and fixed me with that Snape-like glare. I held my breath, wondering if I’d managed somehow to offend him. We listened to Helena shrieking in the background. The wind blew. It was cold, we were tired, and we weren’t allowed to move from the spot where our feet had been planted for the last three hours. A Hollywood red carpet this was not.

Very slowly, very distinctly, Alan intoned, “I’ve… peaked.”

Then he turned his head to look the other way. But as he turned, I saw the whisper of a smile on his lips. And I realised then that, far from being the terrifying figure I’d always assumed he must be, Alan was a man with a brilliantly dry sense of humour. I didn’t need to be wary of him. Far from it. I needed to relish the time I had with this smart, witty, interesting man.

At the beginning of filming, you were given your own chair with your character’s name on the cloth back rest. These chairs would be with us for the duration of filming.

One day, Alan Rickman was sitting around with Helena Bonham Carter, Helen McCrory, Jason Isaacs and Michael Gambon. Even by Harry Potter standards, that’s a pretty impressive group of heavyweights. That’s the crème de la crème of the British film world right there. They sat in their comfortable director’s chairs. I had a much smaller fold-up chair, as when I started the films my feet would never have touched the ground from one of the taller ones. Almost immediately, Alan stood up. He walked over to one of the assistant directors, pointed in my direction and demanded that I was given a proper director’s chair, so that I could sit at the same height as the rest of them. At first I wondered if it was a bit of a joke, but it soon became clear that he was absolutely serious. “Alan, mate,” I said, “it’s fine, I’m happy sitting on my shorter chair.” He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He didn’t kick up a fuss, he wasn’t impolite, he just quietly insisted that I was brought a chair of the same height as the others.

It was a small thing, but I’ll never forget that moment of kindness. Alan wanted a younger cast member to be treated like an equal to these leading lights. He didn’t have to do it, but the fact that he did spoke volumes about the man he was.

I think about that moment with the director’s chair often, now that Alan has passed away. And not only Alan, of course. Richard Harris, John Hurt, Helen McCrory… the list of actors from the Harry Potter films who are no longer with us inevitably grows. When I think of their passing, I find myself in purgatory because it’s only now that I’ve reached adulthood that I’ve started to understand the effect that they had on me, and how brilliant they were as examples.

We barely notice the passing of time. There are moments when I still think of myself as the kid stealing DVDs from HMV. Then there are moments when I realise I’m definitely not. I’ll meet fans who are closer to being unborn than they are to my age. In fact, most fans who approach me now weren’t born when the first films were being made. I’ll be on a film set where, far from being one of the scrappy kids, I’m the veteran. And it’s in those moments, when it’s important to me that I comport myself in the right way, that I realise what a positive influence those actors were, who I grew up with and who have gone on before. It strikes me that yet again life has mirrored art. In the Harry Potter films we played young, inexperienced wizards who went to a school to learn from brilliant wizards, and some of their brilliance rubbed off on us, so that seven years later we came out as half-decent adults. So it was in real life. The filmmakers picked a bunch of child actors, raw, unskilled and frankly without much idea of what they were doing. But if you let them hang around with the cream of the crop of British acting for a few years, they’re bound to learn a thing or two.

And we did. But not in a clumsy way. Nobody took me to one side and said, “Son, this is how you’re supposed to behave on a film set.” I learned just as much from what these people didn’t do as from what they did. They didn’t demand special treatment. They didn’t raise their voices or make a fuss about anything. It was much later in my career that I learned this is not always the norm. I’ve been on film sets, especially in America, where an actor will arrive an hour late on purpose, as a power move or out of sheer obliviousness. Where he or she will shout “Cut!” in the middle of a scene when it is most definitely not their place to do so. It’s the opposite to the calm, polite, prepared British authority my mentors exhibited. It always surprises me, when people comment on the way I hold myself on set, that anything less than basic respect for the people around me should even be considered acceptable. That’s an attitude we learned from people like Alan. They are one of the main reasons, I think, that we kids didn’t grow up to be assholes. We grew up watching them treat everybody on set with kindness, patience and respect. Alan would routinely offer to make cups of tea for people. He would talk to us children—and more importantly to every single member of the crew, from the camera team to the catering department—no differently to how he’d talk to his contemporaries. When he did make his presence felt—like when we trod on his fucking cloak—it was always with a subtle twinkle in his eye. Sometimes it could be hard to discern, but it was always there.

I wish, now that I’m older, that I could thank those actors who have passed away for everything they did for us. By their example, they kept us humble and good humoured, and I’ll always be grateful for that.