Matthew Lewis, who portrayed Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter movies, has revealed that he gets “frustrated” by being remembered solely for his work in the Wizarding World.
Lewis recently appeared on an episode of Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside Of You Podcast, where he discussed his relationship with the Harry Potter series. Most notably, the actor revealed that he often feels frustrated when the media fails to acknowledge the work he’s done since Harry Potter.
“I still to a degree get a bit frustrated sometimes when people sort of say, ‘Oh, he’s’ – for example, I’m doing this show at the minute; it’s on PBS, and a lot of the headlines are, ‘He’s no longer Neville Longbottom anymore.’ It’s like, ‘I haven’t been that for ten years.’ And I have done things that have been so wildly different. I’ve been in dramas that have won BAFTAs and done all of this kind of stuff. And I’m not bragging; it’s just [that] I’ve done all this stuff, and ten years later, it’s still like people are making the claim I’ve sort of jumped from ‘Harry Potter’ into this and have completely ignored the journey it’s taken to get there.”
Lewis, who has most recently appeared in the popular reboot of All Creatures Great and Small, went on to state that while he doesn’t have any frustration when it comes to his work in the Harry Potter movies – he gets frustrated when the media chooses to ignore all of the work he has done in the past ten years.
“That can be frustrating – not that I’m frustrated with anything to do with ‘Harry Potter,’ but it’s like you have that voice in your head that goes, ‘Hey, you know all that work you did for the past ten years? No one f***ing saw it. No one cares. They still think this is the first job you’ve done since Harry Potter.‘”
While we will always love Matthew Lewis for his portrayal of Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter movies, it is important to remember that all of the actors have moved on to different projects – and it would be disrespectful to ignore all of the great work they have done since the Harry Potter series came to an end.
Have you seen Matthew Lewis in any non-Potter movies/TV shows recently? Let us know in the comments section below!
