Tom Felton looks different. It may seem like a cliché to point that out, but it’s the first thought I have as we shake hands inside a sparsely filled canalside pub in King’s Cross, north London. The man that sits before me couldn’t be further from Draco Malfoy. Long gone is the bleached blond hairdo, the snide Slytherin glint in his eye. He wears a white woollen cardigan, and sits drinking tea; before we speak, he politely explains that he has to first make a phone call to his mother. Some villain.
Felton is here because he has written a memoir, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard. It’s been 11 years since the final Harry Potter film, The Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and more than two decades since he was first cast as the flaxen-haired Draco. Despite a memorable role in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and supporting turns in Amma Asante’s period dramas Belle (2013) and A United Kingdom (2017), Felton, now 35, has struggled to escape Potter’s huge gravitational pull.
