The Potter cast were all over the TV shows in the US to promote the sitxh Potter film, The Half-Blood Prince. Dan was at Live with Regis and Kelly and also appeared on The Today Show. Rupert has also appeared in Today while Emma was at the Early Show (we will have that video once we get it). Lastly, Tom made a stop at the Rolling Stone magazine studio where he was interviewed by Peter Travers.
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During the US press conference for the sixth Potter film, Emma Watson talked excitedly about going to university this fall. However, she hopes that her roommate is not a Potter fan.
“As long as there are no Harry Potter posters on the wall, I will be fine and happy,” Watson, 19, told PEOPLE at the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince press conference in New York Thursday. “Oh God, it’s part luck, isn’t it. We’ll see.”
Dan jibbed her though that he hopes for the exact opposite.
Daniel Radcliffe, however, saw an opportunity to tease his costar. “I really hope they are a really massive Harry Potter fan,” joked Radcliffe. “I hope you walk in and the first thing you see is your face on a duvet.”
With her moving out to the US in late August, what are the things she will miss most in England?
“I will miss marmite, baked beans, London taxis and the rain!” Watson told PEOPLE Thursday night at the film’s premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre. “I may have to bring boxes full of marmite and baked beans with me.”
Emma also expressed her interest in continuing to act.
“I definitely want to continue. I’ve managed to juggle and balance studying and working well enough to this point so I can’t see why I can’t keep doing that,” she said. “But I am looking forward to being a normal teenager and want a normal experience for a bit. Just a little bit of normality for a while would be nice.”
To read the rest of the article, click on the link above.
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Despite as already being released, Warner Bros. released a new trailer for the Mac version of the HBP Video game. To view the new trailer, click on the link above.
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In today’s “pap” driven world, where every move is chronicled and ridiculed, its very hard for a young actor to maintain a good acting career despite the attention he/she would have to deal with. There are some young actors who have fallen victim to fame and have been followed 24/7, and have their lives put up in website for everyone to criticize.
But there are also those select few who have balanced career and fame, and have steered out of toruble. They are dubbed as the “Squeaky clean actors/performers” – but at least, they have sensible heads. One of these actors is Freddie Stroma, who plays the cokcy Cormac MacLaggen in the Half-Blood Prince.
I don’t drink, I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life and I don’t take drugs. I tried a drink a few years ago but it just wasn’t my thing so I simply stopped. I prefer to go out clubbing without having a drink,” says Harry Potter newcomer, Freddie Stroma, 22, matter-of-factly over salad at the sedate Mulholland Tennis Club in Los Angeles.
Stroma is not your typical actor. He is not only good-looking and talented but he also has a degree in neuroscience.
“Education has always been very important to me,” says Stroma, who attended the Hogwarts-style Radley College, a boys’ boarding school in Oxfordshire. “I enjoyed every minute there. It was a very good school with great facilities and great teaching. It was lovely and old-fashioned and they really taught their children how to be gentlemen. I was having so much fun that I rarely got homesick.”
He has also shunned the social networking sites when he saw photos of his friends and family making into different websites.
“I left Facebook after Facebook groups began appearing about me and suddenly your personal photographs start becoming public property,” explains the handsome, blond, 5ft 11in actor.
“When the BBC first announced the new cast members, I hadn’t even started filming and yet there were all these websites, all having something to say about me. It was very bizarre. It was mostly complimentary, but because I do a bit of modelling as well, they’d got hold of my portfolio so all those pictures got around too. Now there are message boards about me: all these people claiming to be good sources saying things that are completely inaccurate, like my parents are divorced and stuff, none of which is true.
“It’s not like there’s any drunken photographs out there of me, it was just more the fact that they were my photos of friends and family; suddenly, everyone could look at them.”
He is also impressed how his Potter co-stars – Emma, Dan and Rupert – handled fame.
“There is that Hollywood scene of young stars who seem to get a lot of bad press, but Emma, Dan [Radcliffe] and Rupert [Grint] are such brilliant role models. There’s simply nothing bad to report about them because they’re all really lovely and they are down to earth.
“Maybe it’s because they work so hard and it’s been one film after the other –and they’ve been doing it since they were 12 or so – and they work such long days. They must have time to let loose or whatever, but they’re working constantly so they grew up quick, I think. They learned how to behave themselves and I imagine they must have had good role models around them to look up to.”
And if his post – Potter career doesnt flourish, he has another career to fall into.
“If my dramatic career doesn’t work out, I will go on to research and find cures for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s and other motor neurone diseases. It’s a very exciting field of research. But I’d like to continue in drama so it wouldn’t be very smart of me if I blew this amazing opportunity with an inappropriate lifestyle.”
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For years, there is no other franchise that rivals Harry Potter. It has dominated the book-seller lists as well as commanded supremacy in the box-office, making it as the most successful movie franchise of all time. The fan base is very big and the attention these fans generate is unrivaled.
However when the sixth Potter movie, The Half-Blood Prince was bumped by studio execs into the summer movie season (it was supposed to be released last November), another best-seller turned into a movie moved into its spot and commanded attention. This is Twilight – the teen vampire books written by Stephenie Meyer – whose rabid fan base put the book and movie into the mainstream map and the attention of everybody.
Now that Potter is back and the Twilight franchise has so far is the “center” of the teen attention, is there room for both?
In an article by the Wall Street Journal, writer Lauren A.E. Schuker, explores the teen attention the two book franchise gets. The two maybe different in the sense of how its written and what the stories explores but they are also connected as they share more than just rabid fans but also actors. The lead actor of Twilight, Robert Pattinson, is an alumna of Harry Potter – having acted in two Potter films. And, Jamie Campbell Bower who plays vampire Cauis is going to portray Gellert Grindewald, the evil wizard that caught the affection of Albus Dumbledore.
Here is an excerpt of her article:
As a new “Harry Potter” movie opens next week, the bespectacled wizard faces a new challenge: how to compete for the attention of a young audience that has been growing up—and is starting to prefer the angsty teen romances and cooler, edgier characters of the “Twilight” books and movies.
The film moves directly into territory where “Twilight” now rules. The sixth “Potter” movie, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” has a distinctly more grown-up tone than its predecessors and features a strong romantic plotline.
Hollywood marketing executives say that these days the “Twilight” franchise has influenced almost every studio marketing campaign that targets teenage girls. Some posters for the upcoming “Potter” film echo “Twilight”’s emphasis on romance. One features Harry and his crush, Ginny, gazing longingly into each others’ eyes, in a pose reminiscent of “Twilight”’s now-iconic image of its star-crossed lovers, Bella and Edward. Another shows Harry’s friend Ron with his girlfriend Lavender, while a jealous Hermione scowls in the background.
Warner Bros. and the team behind “Potter” say they didn’t take the “Twilight” franchise into account when designing their marketing materials for “The Half-Blood Prince.” Instead, they crafted a campaign aimed to resonate with previous “Potter” films, the executives and filmmakers say, dismissing the notion that there is a rivalry between the franchises among fans.
“With all due respect to “Twilight,” the longevity and world-wide success of the Harry Potter franchise speaks for itself,” a studio representative said.
The previous five “Potter” films have grossed almost $4.5 billion in world-wide box-office revenue, making the franchise one of the biggest in history. J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books have sold more than 400 million copies world-wide, compared with 53 million for Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series. But after 10 years on the New York Times best-seller list, the “Potter” books fell off the children’s-series list last May, and since then have returned only intermittently. Meanwhile, the “Twilight” books have spent 100 weeks on the chart.
To read the rest of the article, click on the link above.
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In new interview by The Star Ledger – NJ, Potter casting director Fiona Weir talked about how they cast the prominent British actors that makes cameos and portrays roles in the Potter films.
“The Harry Potter world is a crowded world, and we always try to choose actors who are very vivid,” says casting director Fiona Weir, whose first “Potter” film was 2005’s “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” “Even though they can play into the heightened ‘Harry Potter’ world, it’s important they remain truthful and naturalistic.”
“These are British stories, and over here we have a wealth of fabulous actors,” says Weir. She works in collaboration with director David Yates, who’s been at the helm since 2007’s “Order of the Phoenix.” They’ve just started production on the series’ coda, “The Deathly Hallows,” which is to be released in two parts.
“We don’t have a blockbuster film culture like there is in America,” notes Weir. “Our actors, a majority of them, come from a theater background or come from an independent film background.”
Of course casting the right British thespian for the role is very challenging. They have to look sometimes at the actor’s background and previous works to see if they are fit for the role.
“It’s a unique phenomenon,” she explains. “Some of the cast came to it knowing the minutiae of the stories, and for some it’s their first experience with it and they devour the books. More than one actor has said, ‘My children will forgive me for everything I ever do if I get to be in the film.’”
“That was a big challenge, but Ralph was the only person, really, for that part,” says Weir. “I’ll never forget him in ‘Schindler’s List.’ There was no one in the world more frightening than the commandant he played.”
This of course is a joy to the young Potter cast such as Tom Felton, who can get tips and learn from their more experienced British thesps.
“Our teachers are the best actors in the world,” says Felton, who will make an appearance at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus on Friday. “Sometimes you’ve got to remind yourself to stay in character, because you can just sit there and marvel at how each of these people jump from their own persona to this whole other persona.”
“Helena is such a lovely, highly educated lady,” says Felton. “She’ll be telling me about something interesting that happened in the 16th century and straight away, when they roll cameras, she turns into the most evil woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”
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