Matthew Lewis’s face is everywhere.
On the wall to his right, smiling at a poster of the 2012 West End revival of “Our Boys”, a Jonathan Lewis play. In the alcove behind him, arms crossed and stony face in a group photo of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. And in front of his laptop’s camera, eyes widening under his gray cap and dark brown hair as he explains the seemingly self-promotional backdrop.
“It’s not my home!” said the 31-year-old actor. He and his wife were visiting their parents on Christmas Eve in Leeds, the city of Yorkshire, 320 km north of London, where he was born, he explained (after being quarantined for five days and tested negative for coronavirus ). But he forgot the fact that their home office is, well, a sanctuary for him.
“They are very proud,” he said, as if he wanted nothing more than an invisibility cloak.
But shyness is no longer necessary for the man who for a decade played the clumsy, stuttering Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films. Last year he spent time in the vicinity of the Yorkshire Dales, not far from Leeds, filming his role as Hugh Hulton, a wealthy landowner and rival petitioner for veterinarian James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) for the affection of a daughter. farmer, Helen Alderson (Rachel Shenton) in the reboot of “All Creatures Great and Small”, the “Masterpiece” series that started airing on Sunday nights on PBS this month.
The seven-episode series, based on James Alfred Wight’s beloved books, inspired by his adventures as a young veterinarian in Yorkshire in the 1930s, was a surprising success when it debuted in Britain this fall. Celebrated as an emotional balm for viewers tired of the pandemic, it has become Channel 5’s most watched show since 2016 and has been renewed for a second season.
For fans who were used to Lewis as the clumsy Longbottom, his entry at the end of the second episode was a shock.
A decade after the last Potter film – he no longer looks like Draco Malfoy’s clumsy, chubby punching bag – his career has been moving away from that type of character for a while.
“It was not necessarily a conscious decision,” he said. “I was lucky to see those papers that were offered to me.”
His first post-Potter role was as Jamie Bradley, a 22-year-old salesman who got involved in drugs and crime but tried to change his life, in the BBC drama “The Syndicate” in 2012, followed by a self-centered fitness fanatic in “ Me Before You ”in 2016 and a single father under house arrest on“ Girlfriends ”in 2018.
Off-screen, he filmed a shirtless cover for Attitude magazine’s swimsuit edition in 2015 that left JK Rowling scolding him on Twitter: “Let me know next time, for God’s sake” (to be fair, he also didn’t warn his mother, he said).
“There was a very intense pressure coming from ‘Harry Potter’,” he said. “I didn’t want to be known as a trick pony.”
Lewis is the last Potter actor to hit television recently. Harry Melling, who played Harry’s tormentor Dudley Dursley, shocked fans when he appeared as a slim and elegant chess champion in “The Queen’s Game” on Netflix. Rupert Grint plays one of the four protagonists of the Apple TV + series “Servant”, a psychological thriller by M. Night Shyamalan. Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself, is an executive producer and star of the TBS comedy “Miracle Workers”.
(Other Potter alumni, like Emma Watson, better known as Hermione Granger, and Robert Pattinson, who played the golden boy Cedric Diggory, became bona fide movie stars.)
But Lewis is still accepting to be a protagonist – God forbid, a sexy man. That’s why, when the opportunity arose to audition for “All Creatures Great and Small”, Lewis hesitated.
“The original series is kind of an institution in Yorkshire and my dad really wanted me to do that,” he said. “But this guy must be very dark and handsome, and it has to be credible that Helen is in love with him. I was like, ‘I don’t know about that. When I shave, everyone will see that I am about 12 years old. ‘”
Even after getting the role, he still didn’t think everything was okay. “I was afraid to show up on the first day on the set,” he said. “I was sure they would do, ‘Is this what he really looks like? Jesus, we need to reframe this guy. ‘”
But series director Brian Percival, who directed several episodes of the Emmy-winning drama “Downton Abbey”, was well aware of Lewis’s previous work on Potter films – and was sure he had experience and confidence – not to mention his accent from Yorkshire – needed to remove the role of Hugh.
“I like to cast actors who can relate in some real and tangible way to the characters they play,” he said. “Hugh needs to have an air of natural confidence that is born of privilege, and Matthew did it incredibly well.”
Lewis said he struggles with roles that are very similar to his own life. “I find it quite difficult when a lot of me starts to show in a character,” he said. “It’s easier when I can play someone completely different, like a policeman in London or someone who is rich.”
That’s why he finds it difficult to watch the Harry Potter films again.
“Sometimes it is painful how much of me is in Neville,” he said. “When I’m watching, I’m like, ‘This isn’t Neville; is that you.'”
David Yates, who directed the last four Potter films, said Lewis had a greater role in shaping his character in later films. “Matthew was a supporting player when I arrived to direct ‘Order of the Phoenix’,” he said. “But he became more confident, more curious, more present as the films progressed. And more ambitious. “
Yates continued to think of ways to expand Lewis’s role in the scenes, ultimately building a sequence around him in “Deathly Hallows: Part 2” in which Neville blows up a bridge to Hogwarts to thwart the dark wizard Voldemort’s army – a scene that did not exist in the book or in the early drafts of Steve Kloves’ script. “But it captured Neville’s charm and the quality of Matthew’s common man,” said Yates. “He had a modesty and an honesty that were hard to ignore.”
Lewis recently landed a lead role in Curtis Vowell’s New Zealand comedy “Baby Done” as a future father who will try everything from drugs to a trio to ease his adventurous girlfriend’s despair at the prospect of motherhood.
But despite Lewis’ growing heartthrob status, his older brother Anthony said he was still a big nerd. He plans family pub quizzes for all holidays, including one for that night. “He’s extremely competitive,” said Anthony Lewis, “to the point of being obsessive. It can be quite intense and extremely irritating. “
But if ‘ex-Harry Potter actor’ is the label that follows him for the rest of his career, well, Lewis said, that would be fine with him.
“If there is something people remember you for, there are worse things than the Harry Potter franchise,” he said. “It opened so many doors for me when, otherwise, I wouldn’t even have entered the room.”