Harry Potter star Evanna Lynch has revealed she went home to do her homework moments after she got the call telling her she landed the role of Luna Lovegood in the hit franchise.
The Co Louth native successfully auditioned for the role in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the age of 14. Evanna recalled how she had gotten a call telling her the good news while standing outside her local Spar with her mother.
She said: “Oh you don’t forget that. I was outside our local Spar shop. It was on the way home from school on the Monday. They told us they were going to call and say, you know, after school.
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“I was worried because my mum was in the shop, and she meets everyone she knows… the whole village is in the shop… and I just thought ‘we’re going to miss the call and then I won’t get the part and then they’ll give it to the next person’. So, I went in to do the shopping to try and hurry things up and then they called my mobile.”
She admitted to Miriam O’Callaghan on her Sunday morning radio show on RTE Radio 1 that getting the call was “an outer body experience”, admitting she felt like she needed to go home and do her homework.
“Definitely… it was similar to like in an emergency, when you panic. You’re kind of like.. you’re clinging to the nearest real thing and for me I was like, ‘right I’ve just got to get home and do my homework’. Again, because I’m a nerd and that is what I knew,” she said laughing.
“When something big lie that happens, you think just one step at a time. Just do the next thing and then the next thing and for me that was homework.”
But Evanna opened up about how she was hospitalised with anorexia when she was around 10 or 11 years of age. She tells of her struggles in her new memoir, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting, which is out now.
She said Harry Potter bosses knew her struggles and made every effort to “protect” her.
“The PR department on the films were very protective, they knew my whole story and there had been a few newspapers who had threatened to leak the story and the PR department got really, well very protective, and they kind of said well you know there are child confidentiality issues here.
“But then I really felt like I needed to say this and tell my story, otherwise you’re just a bit one dimensional. You’re just hiding behind a character. You’re not really being yourself and the world of celebrity is so fake, it’;s so image based and I was finding it such a strain to be trying to fit in with that while also having these struggles, which I’d only recently come out of.”
She added that she felt liberated for “speaking her truth” after it.Evanna said reading JK Rowling's books gave her "relief" from her eating disorder, long before she landed the role.
"I would open those books and I wouldn't be thinking about food or my problems or my obsession."She said she wrote to her to thank her, "because I felt connected to this person".
"I was very lucky back in those days she used to read fan mail. I actually went to one of her book events and there were six other kids she had written to over the years.
"We wrote back and forth to each other for years."
But Evanna said she never told Rowling that she was the person who played Lovegood because she feared Rowling would be furious that someone 'sick' was playing one of her most loved characters.
"No. Because I was worried - because I had told her all about my problem - and I was so worried that she would feel 'I don't want a sick person playing one of my most beloved characters' and a character is so pure of heart and pure of mind, which I felt I wasn't at the time."
But the producers had sent her a casting list with her name on it, and Rowling wrote to her telling her she was "delighted" Evanna was playing Lovegood.
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