Mean Guy

In person, Tom Felton is as amiable as they come, yet he spent his youth playing a creep and bully as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films.

Just weeks after the franchise finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Felton will be back as another meanie, playing a cruel primate tender in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

As Harry’s spiteful, scheming classmate at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Felton grew up as the kid Potter fans love to hate. Now that his run as Draco is nearly over, Felton, 23, wants people to know he’s really a nice guy.

“I get a lot of journalists saying how similar are you to your character or how alike are you? God, I hope I’m not anything even remotely close other than in the way we look,” Felton said in an interview in London last fall. “I think we’re polar opposites. I like to think of myself as a fairly un-Draco-esque character.”

Felton, who has been acting professionally since age 9, started off with different aspirations in the Harry Potter world. More than a decade ago, he auditioned for the title role of author J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series, a part that went to Daniel Radcliffe.

Chris Columbus, who directed the first two Potter movies, had Felton’s hair dyed dark brown for his Harry audition. After Radcliffe won the role, Felton said his hair was dyed ginger for an audition to play Harry’s school chum, Ron Weasley, a part that went to Rupert Grint. Felton jokes that he even tried out as Harry’s brainy friend Hermione Granger, played by Emma Watson.

“Finally, Chris Columbus said, ‘Dye his hair blond and slick it back,’ and that was the birth of Draco,” Felton said. “I’m not quite sure how I felt about that one. Obviously, he saw something very malicious and horrible in me as an 11-year-old.”

While disappointed back then that he did not land one of the leads, Felton said that after a decade in Draco’s skin, he would not swap his character for anyone else in the Potter realm.

“I certainly was one of the luckiest, in my opinion, because I get to play someone who’s so different, hopefully, from myself in real life,” Felton said. “I love this role so much now, I wouldn’t want to play anything else. And more to the point, the main three play it better than anyone. As good a Hermione as I could have done, I’m pretty sure the three of them take the biscuit. They all do the job fantastically.”

MALICE TOWARDS NONE

Raised in London, Felton began his career with a key role in the 1997 film fantasy The Borrowers, then played Jodie Foster’s son in 1999’s Anna and the King before landing the part as Draco.

The Harry Potter filmmakers say that along with Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, Felton grew up on set from a relatively inexperienced child performer to an assured young actor ready for adult roles.

David Yates, who directed the final four of the eight Potter films, said Felton really came into his own with No. 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as Draco begins to regret the malice bred into him by his treacherous parents.

“Seeing Malfoy get some depth in Half-Blood Prince, that was Tom’s film in a way,” Yates said. “He got to play a really compelling character throughout, because he’s got really awful parents, and they’re so determined to make him into this little fascist. ... Tom just benefited from the opportunity to move out from those narrow confines of, he’s sort of a nasty kid, to where you say, ‘OK, he’s a nasty kid, but inside him, he’s got something else going on.’”

Among future roles, Felton co-stars with Taraji P. Henson in the golf drama From the Rough and with Twilight actress Ashley Greene in the horror tale The Apparition.

In the prequel Rise of the Planet of the Apes, due out in early August, Felton plays a malicious worker at a primate facility whose abuse of an unusually intelligent chimpanzee is one of the catalysts for a simian rebellion against humans.

“It goes without saying that I don’t care for our residents very well. I have a whole arsenal of weapons that I use at my pleasure,” Felton said. “An unpleasant guy again, I’m afraid.”

Amid acting, Felton also is indulging his passion for music. He and some friends have been recording songs and recently started their own independent record label.

No matter how his career goes, Felton knows the Harry Potter franchise probably will remain the biggest thing on his list of credits. And passionate Potter fans likely will not let him forget the nasty ways that Draco taunted Harry.

“There’s been many, many a threatening letter, and I mean this in a nice way, where it’s sort of like, ‘Leave Harry alone or we’ll come and get you,’ that sort of thing. I always feel bad. I don’t want to burst their bubble and say, ‘You’re aware that we’re friends in real life’ and so forth,” Felton said.

“People are literally living in that world. It’s great that we managed to create something so believable, or certainly, Jo (J.K. Rowling) has, but it is a little worrying at times. ... I just get a lot of distasteful looks from under seven-year-olds, and I’ve been booed and hissed at a few times, that I take as nothing but a compliment. I must be doing something right.”

Out of the Potter kids’ mouths... then and now

It has been a life lived in the public eye for the Potter kids.

Indeed, for 10 years and eight movies, we’ve watched Harry, Ron and Hermione grow bigger and bolder and more resourceful, while in their offscreen lives we’ve seen none of the child-star meltdowns that seem so prevalent on these shores. In fact, Daniel Radcliffe had to tell us he once had a drinking problem, no one ever caught wind of it.

The release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 brings this era to a close, putting the final touches on a series that has made three young Brits examples of how to do child stardom right.

“They’re lovely kids, just lovely, and I don’t think they have any idea how their lives could change,” actor Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid) had said back in 2001.

They do now.

Here’s what they said back then about subjects ranging from fame and their future to “objects of desire.”

And here’s how they answered the same questions on the stump for the last in the series: this weekend’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. Reuters

DANIEL RADCLIFFE

Radcliffe may now be a Broadway star after performing naked in Equus and singing and dancing in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but we remember him as a 12-year-old who talked enthusiastically about the World Wrestling Federation and said he was listening incessantly to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack.

On recreation:

THEN: “We love practical jokes. I went out shopping with one of the runners and bought all these fake blood capsules,” he said. “And so I got one of the fake blood capsules and put it in my mouth and burst it, and then I smashed my fist down on the steel steps outside makeup, so it sounded like I’d just hit them. Then I rolled into the makeup bus and spat out all this blood.”

NOW: “I became so reliant on alcohol to enjoy stuff. There were a few years there when I was just so enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person’s lifestyle that really isn’t suited to me.”

On fame:

THEN: “I think it’s going to be fun. I think it’s gonna be... just fun.”

NOW: “I get constantly mistaken for Elijah Wood. I was in Japan and someone held out a photo of him for me to sign. I couldn’t say it in Japanese so I wrote, ‘I’m not Elijah Wood but thanks anyway, Daniel Radcliffe.’ If I was a bit more puerile I would have written The Lord of the Rings is rubbish.”’

On his future:

THEN: “I think, well, I might like to be an actor, but there are loads of other things I’m really interested in as well. Like music and writing and sports and things. Loads of things. I want to keep my options open.”

NOW: “If I can make a career for myself after Potter, and it goes well, and is varied, and with longevity, then that puts to bed the child actors argument. If I can do it, in the biggest film franchise of all time, no other child actor who comes after will ever have to answer those same bloody questions.”

RUPERT GRINT

The oldest of the kids at 13 when the first film was released, Grint had one of the most delightful resumes ever to grace a major Hollywood film.

“In Noah’s Ark, I was a fish,” he said, detailing his grammar school drama career. “The Nativity Play, I think I was a donkey. Cinderella, I was just a chorus thing. And Rumplestiltskin, I was Rumplestiltskin.”

On a useful magical power:

THEN: “I would like to fly on a broom. Be invisible. Have all those magic sweets, that kind of stuff.”

NOW: “I do miss it, sometimes, the invisibility. Being able to get ‘round to the store’. Not meet anyone who wants to take a picture with you. It’s manageable but it’s just, like, constant.”

On school:

THEN: “I do miss my school friends and the school atmosphere and stuff. But I think I’m learning a bit more ‘in tutoring’ than I would if I was in school.” Favorite subject? “Ummm...Probably don’t have one. I guess I like chemistry, because you get to play with potions and things. But other than that...”

NOW: “I found it hard to work and study. After I finished school I just kind of watched daytime TV. I love the Antiques Roadshow, yeah, or any old antiques programme.”

On impending fame:

THEN: “It’s gonna be really brilliant. It’s gonna be fun.”

NOW: “I do, kind of, spend a lot of money. And just on stupid things. Because I don’t really know what to do. What are you supposed to do? It just seems like way too much. We don’t deserve it, at all, for what we do.”

EMMA WATSON

While Watson has turned into a stylish fashion plate who goes to premieres in Elie Saab couture and is the new face of Lancome, she was a fresh-faced 11-year-old wearing a plaid skirt and yellow dress shirt when we picked her up from her school in Oxfordshire in September, 2001.

On parental influence:

THEN: “My mum and dad, who thought I was going to get overexcited about it, were going, ‘Oh Emma, you do know that there’s millions of girls out there.” And that kind of made me go, oh, “I’ve got no chance, my mum and dad are right, there are probably millions and trillions and billions of girls.” But still, I still really wanted to get it.”

NOW: Would you let your child enter show business? “No... I probably wouldn’t. If she really, really wanted to do it, then I would just make sure I was with her. I would make sure that she had the supportive family around her that I did.”

On schooling, from Oxfordshire to the Ivy League:

THEN: “I do miss my school, quite a lot. My friends, mostly. Although I do have quite a lot of friends on the set as well. I also miss my teachers. That sounds really weird, but I do. And I miss being in the whole class with everyone else, instead of sort of being on my own.

NOW: “I was in denial,” she said about going to Brown. “I wanted to pretend I wasn’t as famous as I was. I was trying to seek out normality, but I kind of have to accept who I am, the position I’m in and what happened.”

On objects of desire:

THEN: “For the next movie, I think they should cast Brad Pitt.” For what role? “Any role!”

NOW: “I’ve never understood having crushes on people who you don’t know in real life. I only crush on people I meet. I mean, I can appreciate that someone is good-looking, obviously, but I don’t intend to fantasise about people I don’t know!”