Great interview with Evanna Lynch
Another interview with an Order of the Phoenix star that is just now coming out:
Who says dreams don’t come true? Termonfeckin teenager Evanna Lynch dreamed of playing Luna ‘Loony’ Lovegod in the new Harry Potter movie. And she does, as she explained to Paul Byrne.
I think it would be fair to say that, of the 2,345 people living in Termonfeckin in County Louth, Evanna Lynch is the town’s no.1 Harry Potter fan. If anyone should have a question about Harry Potter and his adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Evanna is the person to talk to. Heck, she even named her cat Luna, after her favourite character, Luna ‘Loony’ Lovegod, a major player in the fifth book, ‘Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix’. When Evanna’s cat had some kittens, she dutifully called one of them Dumbledore, after Hogwart’s much-loved headmaster. Her other cat was called Crookshanks, named after moggy belonging to Harry’s chum, Hermoine Granger.
Tags: Evanna Lynch, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Luna LovegoodEvanna’s love for all things Potter, but in particular, Luna ‘Loony’ Lovegod, inspired her to write a letter to J.K. Rowling, explaining to the author that she would love to play Luna in the movies but, because she lived in a small, sleepy town that no-one had ever heard of, she knew that her chances were very, very slim indeed. Much to Evanna’s delight, Joanne Rowling (the publishers demanded a middle name, and the K stands for Kathleen, her grandmother’s name) wrote back, saying, ‘Don’t be too hard on Termonfeckin; it does have a brilliant name! And I come from a very sleep place’.
In other words, dreams can come true, no matter where you’re from. It was a belief that Evanna kept in heart, and when she learnt on a Tuesday that there was going to be an open audition for the role of Luna Lovegod in London the following Saturday, she convinced her father, Donal, to take her there. Her mum, Marguerite, wasn’t so sure, well aware that her daughter would be one of thousands hoping to nab this crucial part in the fifth movie outing, ‘Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix’. As it turned out, there were 15,000 wide-eyed and excited young girls at the audition, but Evanna still held onto the belief that she simply had to play the part of Luna. No one else in the world could possibly know this girl as thoroughly as Evanna did. “And I got a call on the Monday to fly back over for a screen test,” says the still-excited 15-year old, “which I did, on the Friday. On the Monday, they rang and told me that I’d gotten the part.”
According to the casting director, Fiona Weir, the minute Evanna walked through the door, she knew that “there was only one Luna”. For Evanna, it seems that there was never any doubt either. “I always compare it to this line in the movie, where Harry says, as he’s trying to encourage Dumbledore’s Army to fight, ‘Think of all the great wizards in history – they had to start somewhere. And they could do it, so, why can’t you?’. I just thought, why would someone else get this part? It has to be me. She was the one I put the most attention on, and I just love her.”
It is, of course, pretty much a fairytale come true. Given that it was January last year that Evanna learnt she had gotten the part, has she managed to come down from Cloud Nine by now? “Oh, it still feels like some kind of fairytale,” she smiles. “You keep dreaming about it, and it becomes such a fantasy, but you keep telling yourself, these kinds of dreams never come true. But it did, and I was just stunned. Still am.”
When Daniel Radcliffe learnt he’d gotten the part of Harry Potter back in 2000, he was in the bath. By the time he had stopped celebrating, most of the water was on the floor. Was it a shock to Evanna’s system when she got the call? “This is going to sound silly, but I didn’t find it really hard to believe,” she answers, “because I’d been preparing myself for the idea for so long. I was still stunned though. I had to keep it really quiet for a few days.” That must have been difficult. “Yeah, I was going into school, and they all knew I’d been to the audition. ‘Have you heard back yet?’. ‘No, no callback yet’. It was really frustrating.”
When Evanna was finally free to reveal the good news, well, unsurprisingly, Termonfeckin went a little crazy. “Yeah, suddenly everyone was noticing me. I’m kinda quiet, and I don’t know loads of people, but suddenly, everyone was interested in you, and wanted to talk to you. My friends didn’t change though – they know me, and they know what I’m like – but it was just people who didn’t know me. They were curious, and wanted to ask me lots of questions.”
That was a year ago though. Now, Evanna says, life is disappointingly normal, “like it never happened”. Having lived the high life of the big-budget movie shoot – with on-set tutoring, top-of-the-range catering, and stars like Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon and Ralph Fiennes popping by – getting back to the everyday grind of preparing for a Junior Cert doesn’t quite have the same thrill factor. “You start to wonder if it really happened,” says Evanna. “You’re living this exciting lifestyle, and everything’s different, and then you go back home, and it’s all exactly the same.”
Not that Evanna isn’t determined to do well in her upcoming exams. Most parents of budding movie star kids are worried that boring old education might take a permanent backseat for their starry-eyed offspring, but here… “It was actually the opposite. I’m very driven, and I don’t need anyone to tell me that I should do my homework. And I’m getting really worried about this exam now, and my parents are telling me, ‘Stop! Stop doing your homework!’.”
So, what about that first day on set – all a bit of a daze? “Daze is definitely the word. I wanted to see everything, and I wanted to get everything perfect. I would get worried when it wasn’t perfect and I was holding everybody up. When they would shout ‘cut’ and start to move on, I would be asking everyone if that was it, was that the scene that was going to be in the film. I kept wanting to do it again, to make it better and better. That really scared me. You get used to it very quickly though. “I would always read the book before, because Luna is so important here, I wanted her to be exactly as how I imagined her in the book. So, I just read the book to refresh it all the time, between each scene.”
A major fan of Tim Burton (‘Sleepy Hollow’, ‘Charlie & The Chocolate Factory’), Evanna was thrilled to be working alongside the famously gothic director’s other half, Helena Bonham Carter. “I was always scared to talk to her about Tim,” she says. “I had so many questions to ask her.”
With the last book, ‘Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallow’, due on July 21st (one week after the new film), like so many fans of the series, Evanna looking forward to the final outing with both joyous anticipation and ominous dread. “We all so want to know what’s going to happen, and we’ve all been thinking up different scenarios for how the story will end,” says the girl who earned a reputation as the books’ no.1 fan on set. “And we’re all saying that we’ll savour that last book, read a chapter a day, but, I’m sure we’ll all just gobble it up. There’s going to be a helpline for Harry Potter fans when it’s over. Waterstones are setting one up, because there will be a lot of distraught Potter fans when they realise that the story is well and truly over.”
And what about Evanna Lynch – what’s she going to do when her Harry Potter adventure is well and truly over? “I would love to act again, absolutely,” she finishes, “but, right now, it’s just my Junior Cert and Harry Potter. That’s more than enough for a 15-year old girl to have to contend with, don’t you think?”
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1 opinion for Great interview with Evanna Lynch
Bob
Aug 14, 2007 at 16:20
has the person who wrote this actually read the books. its lovegood, not ‘lovegod’
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