Matthew Lewis’ face is everywhere.
On the wall to his right, grinning on a poster for the West End revival of ‘Our Boys’ in 2012, a play by Jonathan Lewis. In the niche behind him, arms were crossed and rocky in a group shot for ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’. And in front of his laptop, his eyes widen under his gray flat cap and dark brown hair as he explains the seemingly self-promoting background.
“This is not my house!” said the 31-year-old actor. He and his wife visited his parents on Christmas Eve in Leeds, the city of Yorkshire, 200 kilometers north of London, where he was born, he explained (after being quarantined for five days and tested negative for the coronavirus). But he overlooked the fact that the study of their house was indeed a sanctuary for him.
“They are very proud,” he said, as if he wanted nothing more than an invisible cloak.
But bashfulness is no longer necessary for the man who played the fussy, stammering Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films for a decade. Last year he spent time in the nearby Yorkshire Dales, not far from Leeds, filming his role as Hugh Hulton, a wealthy landowner and rival to veterinarian James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) for the affection of a farmer’s daughter. , Helen Alderson (Rachel Shenton) in the recharge of “All Creatures Great and Small”, the “Masterpiece” series that started airing on PBS on Sunday nights.
The series of seven episodes, based on James Alfred Wight’s beloved books, inspired by his adventures as a young veterinarian in the 1930s in Yorkshire, was a surprise hit when it was presented in Britain in the autumn. Celebrated as an emotional balm for viewers exhausted by pandemics, it has become Channel 5’s best-rated program since 2016 and has been renewed for a second season.
For fans accustomed to Lewis as the clumsy Longbottom, his entrance at the end of the second episode comes as a shock.
A decade away from the last Potter movie – he no longer looks like Draco Malfoy’s awkward, plump 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 just happy that these were the roles I was offered.”
His first role after Potter was Jamie Bradley, a 22-year-old retailer who ran drugs and crime but tried to turn his life around, in the BBC drama “The Syndicate” in 2012, followed by a self-centered fitness fanatic in “Me Before You” in 2016 and a single dad under house arrest in “Girlfriends” in 2018.
Off-screen, he shot a shirtless cover for the swimsuit issue of Attitude magazine in JK Rowling scold him on Twitter: “Warn me next time, for God’s sake” (he honestly said that he did not give his mother a head shot either, he said.)
“There was a lot of intense pressure from ‘Harry Potter,'” he said. “I did not want to be known as a one-trick pony.”
Lewis is recently the youngest Potter actor to achieve success on television. Harry Melling, who played Harry’s martyr Dudley Dursley, shocked fans when he emerged as a slender, brave chess champion in ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ on Netflix. Rupert Grint plays one of the four lead roles in the Apple TV + series ‘Servant’, a psychological thriller by M. Night Shyamalan. Daniel Radcliffe, himself Harry Potter, is an executive producer and star of the TBS comedy ‘Miracle Workers’.
(Other Potter alumni, such as Emma Watson, best known as Hermione Granger, and Robert Pattinson, who played the golden boy Cedric Diggory, went on to become bona fide movie stars.)
But Lewis is still a leading man – God forbid, a sexy man. Therefore, Lewis hesitated when the opportunity came to audition for ‘All Creatures Great and Small’.
“The original series is a bit in Yorkshire, and my dad wanted me to do it,” he said. ‘But this man is supposed to be very dark and attractive, and it must be credible that Helen is in love with him. I was like, ‘I do not know about this. If I shave, everyone will see that I’m about 12. ‘”
Even after getting the role, he still did not think he was in the clear. “I was scared to show up on set the first day,” he said. “I was sure they would be, ‘What does he really look like? Jesus, we must recreate this man. ‘”
But director Brian Percival, who directed several episodes of the Emmy-winning drama ‘Downton Abbey’, was well aware of Lewis’ previous work on Potter films – and he was sure he had the experience and confidence – to speak of the Yorkshire accent. – needed to subtract the part from Hugh.
“I like to roll actors who can relate in a real and tangible way to the characters they play,” he said. “Hugh must have an air of natural confidence born of privilege, and Matthew has achieved that incredibly well.”
Lewis said he struggles with roles similar to his own life. “I find it quite difficult when too much of me starts to get through in a character,” he said. “It’s easier if I can play someone else, like a London police officer or someone rich.”
That’s why he finds it hard to watch the Harry Potter movies.
“Sometimes it’s painful how many of me are there in Neville,” he said. “When I look, I’m like, ‘This is not Neville; It’s you. “
David Yates, who has directed the last four Potter films, said Lewis takes on a bigger role in the form of his character in the later films. “Matthew was a very supportive player when I came to direct ‘Order of the Phoenix,'” he said. “But he became more confident, curious and more present as the films progressed. And more ambitious.”
Yates kept thinking of ways to expand Lewis’s role in scenes and eventually build a series around him in ‘Deathly Hallows: Part 2′ in which Neville blows up a bridge to Hogwarts to defeat the army of the dark wizard Voldemort. stop – a scene that did not exist in the book or in the early concepts of Steve Kloves’ screenplay. “But it captured the fascination of the everyday quality of Neville and Matthew,” Yates said. “He had a modesty and an honesty that was hard to ignore.”
Lewis recently landed a starring role in Curtis Vowell’s upcoming New Zealand comedy “Baby Done”, as a soon-to-be father who will try anything, from drugs to a trio, to arouse his adventurous girlfriend’s despair with the possibility of motherhood.
But despite Lewis’s rising heart rate, his older brother Anthony said he’s still a big nerd. He plans bar quizzes for family throughout the holiday, including one for the evening. “He’s very competitive,” said Anthony Lewis, “to the point that he’s obsessive. It can be quite intense and is incredibly annoying.”
But if ‘former Harry Potter actor’ is the label that follows him for the rest of his career, well, Lewis said, it will be fine with him.
“If there’s one thing people remember you for, there are worse things than the Harry Potter franchise,” he said. “It opened so many doors for me when I would not have even entered the room otherwise.”