Naysayers! What would we do without them? There are countless stories of people being told “you can’t do it” only to use that as fuel to do whatever it is they were told they couldn’t. Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school team when he was a sophomore. Marilyn Monroe was told she would only be a secretary, and now James Phelps from the Harry Potter movies revealed his drama teacher told him he’d never have an acting career.
James and Oliver Phelps, much better known as the Weasley brothers, appeared on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast and James dug into just what that was like, and what it felt like to go back and rub it in his teacher’s face.
Rosenbaum asked James if he “even wanted to act” and James said it was such a far from reality thing because “no one in our town was an actor.” This is a similar story, by the way, to Bonnie Wright aka Ginny Weasley, whose mother tracked down a casting director because they had no showbiz connections. For James it was worse.
“The drama teacher at our school said ‘don’t take drama for your high school level because you won’t have a career in it.” This was right before he got cast in the film, by the way.
“So, I had great delight going back to him after that summer and be like ‘well, you know nothing.”
James said he told that story at Universal Studios at the opening of the Harry Potter ride and it was used as a promotional video, and a kid from his school tweeted at him and said “The video is banned from being shown in class because everybody keeps playing it when said teacher was giving advice.”
The students would then upbraid the teacher and say, “well, you don’t know anything.” James loved it.
Rosenbaum also wanted to know how it felt when he got that second callback and the actual possibility of being put in the movie inched closer to being a reality.
Oliver said he played it like “well we’ve got this” while James said he “had nothing to compare it with” but he just “imagined himself in the role” when he did the audition. Every audition the brothers did, and there were “five or six of them,” getting the role felt more and more viable.
The brothers appear in all eight Harry Potter movies. They’re available to stream on Max and Peacock.
