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Rupert Grint on his second act, Harry Potter, and child stardom: ‘People were waiting for us to go off the rails’
The second act of the Harry Potter star's career could be more interesting than the first, finds Guy Kelly
Around this time last year, Rupert Grint watched a Harry Potter film for the first time since, well, just about since he made it. He spends every Christmas at his parents’ home in Hertfordshire, surrounded by his four siblings and a smattering of nieces and nephews, and there on the television came Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first in the eight-picture franchise and one of two that sit among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time.
Grint was a cherubic 11-year-old about to start secondary school when he was cast as Ron Weasley, Potter’s frequently terrified redheaded friend, in 2000. He played the role for the next nine years, but hadn’t quite brought himself to rewatch anything.
“It was actually… fine?” he says. “I don’t know why I hadn’t, but I think because it was the first one there had been enough time to detach myself from it and actually enjoy it. But I don’t think I’ll be doing a [viewing] marathon any time soon.”
Now 31, filled out, and with a light beard, Grint has arrived for a day of interviews in central London with a raging hangover. A packet of Anadin Extra sits on the table before him. A black coffee is cradled like the elixir of life. Last night he was out late at ‘Hip Hop Karaoke’ with the cast of his new Apple TV+ series, Servant. He performed Kanye West’s Golddigger. Or tried.
“I thought I knew that song but… it turns out I really don’t,” he says, shaking his head. So familiar is Grint’s face – and copper-coloured mop, particularly – that it takes all the power within me not to refer to him as ‘Ron’ throughout the morning. But he has cast the shackles of wizardry aside well. After a few years in which he wasn’t totally sure what to do, roles in the US crime comedy Snatch and a standout performance in last year’s BBC Agatha Christie miniseries, The ABC Murders, have seen him rise again.
Servant is another step forward. A psychological horror series executively produced by M. Knight Shyamalan (he of The Sixth Sense, The Village and dozens of other twisty, shiver-inducing films), it has a wonderfully creepy premise: an affluent couple in Philadelphia are grieving the death of their 13-week old son, Jericho, and have him replaced by a hyper-realistic ‘reborn doll’ to ease their suffering.
They hire a young nanny to look after ‘him’, which the mother believes is still real. The husband is sick of the whole charade and doesn’t see the point in hiring the nanny but, wait… was that a burble that just came through on the baby monitor? Cue five spooky episodes of not having a clue what’s going on or who’s telling the truth or whether anything is real. It’s excellent.
Grint plays the baby’s hard-drinking, chain-smoking uncle – a what-the-f****is-happening ally to the father.
“It’s a ride, isn’t it? It almost read like a play, as it’s all in one house, which they constructed but it had this dark, heavy energy to it. Particularly in the nursery. You felt a real sense of relief when you left it for the day,” he says. “It’s a story about grief, really. And I’m not a dad but it does really tap into that primal fear about how precious babies are.”
The series also saw him take on an American accent for the first time, with impressive results. “It was challenging, you think you can do the accent, but your tongue is doing something so different. There’s a few words, like ‘aunt’ and ‘floorboards’, that really trip you up.”
Born in Essex but raised in Hertfordshire, Grint’s earliest ambition was to be an ice cream man, but that melted (he did actually go on to own an ice cream van, only to get rid of it when he realised it was “a bit creepy” to drive around handing out lollies) when he sent a video of himself into the open casting for the Harry Potter films. A shy child, he loved the books but had no prior screen acting experience and didn’t think of it as a career. The success of the franchise then saw Grint, as well as co-stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, effectively growing up in public.
“I don’t think that really hit me until midway through, when I became a teenager. I went through a stage of feeling a bit hemmed in. The fame thing was a tricky thing to understand, being shy, so to suddenly not have that invisibility was a lot to take on.
“There’s this classic child actor thing where people are waiting for you to go off the rails. I felt there was a thirst to see that happen. But it was a bubble, and we were very well protected. Some days were worse than others, but for the most part it was a great experience.”
While it was all happening – the fans, the filming, the hysteria – he never really considered that it would end. “Then suddenly it did, and we were out in the big wide world. Which was quite daunting.”
When it did conclude, he paused to consider “do I really want to do this?”, but also felt liberated. “Like, I had control of my hair again – not that I’ve ever done anything different with it. But something that was really symbolic was I had my tonsils out. I was never able to while we filmed, because of the recovery time, so that felt big.”
Afterwards, Radcliffe – who has admitted to once drinking heavily to cope with the attention of being Harry Potter – went straight to Hollywood. Watson became even more successful, juggling her screen career with activism. But Grint, who remains close with the pair, took a little longer to figure things out. Did it ever get competitive, post-Potter?
“I suppose naturally yeah, but I don’t really think about that. It’s not so much competitive because have a very different level of ambition [to them]. I’ve always valued my free time, thinking you have to live a bit as well.”
Didn’t fancy becoming a UN ambassador like Watson, then?
“It’s a lot of work, isn’t it?”
Today he has sympathy with other child stars, be they actors or activists like Greta Thunberg. “It’s very different now, because social media wasn’t really a thing when we were doing it, but you have that on top of this very sudden propulsion into the world.” It helped too, he adds, that “we filmed in Watford.”
He remains UK-based, living in London with his long-term girlfriend, actor Georgia Groome (once child star of Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, creating the real-life romantic crossover no teen Noughties culture fans saw coming). His siblings are nearby – one’s a baker, one has a nail salon, one’s a racing driver, one’s an interior designer – and he’d “like kids in the future, but there’s nothing planned.” He does admit he’d “get a kick out of my grandkids seeing Potter.”
What Potter did leave Grint with is an incredibly healthy bank balance; he’s believed to be worth £25 million. He says he has never been motivated by money, using his to buy strange vehicles (ice cream van included) and invest in property.
“It’s a nice security and I appreciate it, but I have a strange relationship with money because it’s always just… been there, in the background, from such a young age. I’m very lucky, but it can also make you sit back on your laurels, which I did for a period. But in the last few years I’ve found a bit of drive.”
He seems content, hangover aside, and if Servant is anything to go by, Grint’s second act could be even more interesting than his first. Is there any character he’d steer clear of now, I wonder? He thinks on it for a moment.
“Um… I’d probably stray away from wizards.”
Servant is streaming on AppleTV+ now