Bonnie Wright, who played the youngest Weasley in all eight HP movies, recently opened up about getting the role of a lifetime only to see it diminished on screen. “I definitely feel there was anxiety toward performing and doing the best thing as my character built,” Wright said during a recent conversation on the Inside of You podcast, per Entertainment Weekly. “Like, Oh gosh, will I do justice to this character that people love? So that was always hard to do, especially when, inevitably, a lot of the scenes of every character were chopped down from the book to the film. So you didn’t really have as much to show in the film. Sometimes that was a little disappointing because there were parts of the character that just didn’t get to come through because there weren’t the scenes to do that.”
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That’s a very generous way of putting it! In my humblest millennial opinion, it’s not the same way for every character. They got Draco and Neville and Luna right! No, not fighting about Harry Potter in the year 2023, not going there, no.
Thankfully, Wright knows that the fandom doesn’t blame her or fault her performance. “There was no room for much change in those scripts…my anxiety was about, Oh, I’m going to be seen as badly portraying this character, rather than later realizing that I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do that. So it wasn’t really my fault, exactly,” she said, adding, “When fans do share that disappointment…they do it in a way that is like, ‘We know it wasn’t you. We just wanted more of you.’ And that’s the same of every character. If only they could be five-hour-long movies.”
Not everything in an adaptation can be perfectly faithful to the books, but you’d think Harry Potter, the biggest franchise of the ’00s, would’ve tried a little harder to develop one of the central love interests. Obviously, we’re talking about Ginny Weasley, who in the books is feisty, popular, flirty, a rule-breaker, and the kind of rough-and-tumble badass you’d become if you grew up the youngest and only daughter in a house full of a hundred boys. Whereas movie Ginny is…well, she’s just kinda around. There are memes about this.
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