Credit: Inside the MagicWhen you look at the full cast list of the original eight Harry Potter films, it does feel a bit like every prominent British actor of the time popped up in the Wizarding World at some point.
One of the few prominent names missing from that list is James McAvoy. The Scottish actor – known for the likes of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Split (2016), and portraying the younger mutant Charles Xavier, AKA Professior X, in the X-Men franchise – recently revealed his affiliation to the series, and whether he’ll pop up in its upcoming reboot.
In a recent chat on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, James McAvoy claimed that he came extremely close to playing Tom Marvolo Riddle, AKA the younger version of Harry Potter’s arch-nemesis, Lord Voldemort.
“I was nearly in Harry Potter,” he said. “Almost.”
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McAvoy explained that he auditioned for young Tom Riddle in the franchise’s second entry, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), and was down to the final stages before the team behind the Warner Bros. film had a strange request that turned him off the role.
“They wanted to put me on a retainer,” McAvoy explained. “They offered me something. It was crazy. I’d hardly done any work [at that time]. Me and maybe 10 other actors, they wanted to put us on retainer so they could hold us and keep us to choose later who it would be,” he said.
“It was a really strange thing. They offered quite a lot of money for me at the time. It was a ton of money. It was like £40,000 pounds or something like that. I’d done very little work.”
However, after talking to his agent, McAvoy decided to turn it down – mainly because doing so would have prevented him from doing other work. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any work for about seven months, I think it was. I said to my agent, ‘What do you think?'” McAvoy said. “She was like, ‘Absolutely not. Don’t do that.'”
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Instead, McAvoy accepted the part of a gay hustler in the play “Out in the Open,” which paid him £275 per week. The job wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; McAvoy revealed he was actually booed off stage by a “homophobic gentleman” during one performance.
The role of Tom Riddle eventually went to English actor Christian Coulson, but by the time Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) rolled around, he was replaced because, at 29, he looked too mature to convincingly portray the young Dark Lord. Hero Fiennes Tiffin, the nephew of Ralph Fiennes (who played the adult Voldemort), stepped in to play Riddle as a child, while Frank Dillane took over as the teenage version.
Fortunately, it seems like McAvoy has no regrets about skipping out on the Harry Potter series, as he claimed that “it was part of the making of me.”
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But, of course, the question now is whether McAvoy – who will next star in Speak No Evil (2024) – will jump at a second chance to be a part of the Harry Potter franchise.
HBO is currently in the process of rebooting the series for TV, adapting one book per season. Earlier this week, the first casting calls went out for the three main characters – Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger – with the young actors in question expected to sign up for at least seven years of production, similar to Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson.
However, considering McAvoy’s comments, we’re not convinced he’ll play a part in the show’s sprawling new cast. “I don’t know if there is anything I’m really missing in terms of what I’ve covered [as an actor],” he said.
The reboot’s cast is a huge question mark right now, especially because a significant number of actors (Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson included) have distanced themselves from the franchise’s creator. JK Rowling has spent the past few years dividing X, formerly known as Twitter, with her attitudes towards and attacks on the transgender community. This has split the Harry Potter fandom itself, with many renouncing their Potterhead status in the wake of her comments.
Are you excited for the Harry Potter reboot? Let us know what role you think James McAvoy could play!