I picked up a copy of Harry Potter cast member Evanna Lynch’s biography, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting recently, and the coming-of-age portrait has been startling and insightful. It’s clear the actress known for playing Luna Lovegood was finding her way into the world and determining the person she wanted to be as David Yates was capturing her on camera. Yet one story from the making of the popular franchise stood out to me, and Helena Bonham Carter and Jason Isaacs were involved.
If you’re a huge Harry Potter fan and know anything about Lynch, you may know she’s a careful performer, an overthinker, and a person who is always aiming for “perfection.” She’s the first to admit it, and she does in her book. These traits even came out on the Potter set, as she described her anxiety in trying to create one of the best fantasy movies thusly:
I aimed for perfection, not discovery, trying to play out each line and movement exactly as I’d planned it in microscopic detail in my head. I enjoyed the scenes, but felt gripped by fear each time the assistant director yelled ‘Moving on!’ and I realized that that was it, that was the scene that would be immortalized on film, which millions of people would watch and memorize and remember forever. Stressed…
The actress recognizes while looking back that she was stressing herself out. She even approached David Yates at points to ask him if he “was sure” he was happy with some of her takes. She noted he was a director who liked lots of takes too, leading to plenty of anguish about what would make it into the final version of the film.
She was even intimidated by co-stars like Emma Watson on set, but she was finally able to escape the narrative of putting herself through unnecessary “stress” thanks to watching Carter and Isaacs film one day. She got to set early and saw them filming almost the opposite of how she’d been doing it, noting they did not “second-guess their choices.”
It was something of a shock when I turned up early one day for a scene in the Department of Mysteries to witness Helena Bonham Carter and Jason Isaacs in the midst of an on-camera rehearsal for a dramatic battle scene, and acting like the biggest children on set. I watched in awe as they leapt and twirled about, cackling and swishing their robes flamboyantly in a wildly erratic display of … silliness. Ow was it creativity? They weren’t acting; they were playing.
After that, she said she loosened up a bit, noting in her book it was less about trying to “impress David Yates” and more about finding “creativity in motion.” She called this lesson “the hardest thing to do on a movie set” given all of the eyes from the BTS crew on the actors at all times. But apparently Bonham Carter and Isaacs dominate at it.
Yates directed some of the later movies in the Harry Potter franchise, and Lynch joined the cast of the films with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She would hone her craft in subsequent films like Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows -Part 1 and Part 2 in the franchise’s final years. (Though if you ask her she’s admitted she’s forgotten in moments she was involved in the Wizarding World.) She still acts some, but is interested in causes promoting veganism and mental health pursuits, along with her podcast Just Beings.