45 pages • 1 hour read
Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard
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Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Undesirable No. 1 or Draco’s First Scrape with the Law”
Wanting to impress his friends, a teenaged Felton tries to shoplift a DVD from an HMV store. (The acronym “HMV” stands for “His Master’s Voice” and refers to a British company that sells music, films, games, and technology products). Felton loiters unsubtly for about an hour in the aisle containing the DVD. Spotting the theft, security guards apprehend Felton as soon as he leaves the store with the DVD under his jacket. He begs them not to call his mother, and they agree. Instead, they take a picture of him and add this picture to the wall of other people who have been banned for stealing from the HMV.
Chapter 2 Summary: “My Muggle Family or Runt of the Pack”
Felton, unlike his famous on-screen character Draco Malfoy, comes from a close-knit and loving family. He is described as the “runt” of the pack, being a full six years younger than his next-oldest sibling. Felton’s oldest brother, Jonathan, (also known as Jink), acts on stage in his younger years. Felton’s next brother, Chris, is a talented carp angler (fisher), and acts as a chaperone for Felton on many of the Harry Potter sets. Thanks to Chris, Felton gets a part-time job as a teenager at Bury Hill Fisheries. This also allows Felton and Chris to fish for free. Felton’s next brother, Ash, has a shared passion for American sitcoms like The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-Head. Ash experiences mental health conditions as a teenager.
Felton’s mother encourages Felton to try a range of hobbies and gets multiple jobs to support her sons’ varying interests. Felton’s father sometimes gets irritated with the costs that such interests incur, but he supports his sons’ interests by building a basketball hoop, a hockey net, and a skate ramp. Felton’s parents get divorced when he is 12, and he accepts this fact with little fanfare or grief. His mother lives in the house with the boys during the week, and his father lives there on the weekends. Felton’s father encourages him to be independent, such as by instructing him to walk around by himself in Amsterdam. Felton’s father sometimes seems unsupportive of Felton’s acting career through his childhood, but in reality, his father is very proud of him and struggles with expressing complex emotions.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Early Auditions or Mother Goose”
Felton sings in the church choir as a child. Like his brothers, he is talented, and he is offered a place at a prestigious choir school, but turns the opportunity down. Instead, he joins an after-school drama club, landing only limited roles and often forgetting his lines. When he decides to quit drama club, the organizer implores his mother to get him an agent in London, declaring that Felton has raw talent. His mother is too busy at first to do so, but she gets a shard of glass in her foot and needs to go to London to get it removed. While they are there, they meet an acting agent who puts Felton on the books.
At age seven, Felton lands his first role and travels to the United States to participate in an insurance commercial. He is extremely excited by Cartoon Network and by room service, and he is even mistaken for Macaulay Culkin on one occasion. Felton also auditions for a number of other advertisements and is successful in some. His childhood auditions teach him to be relaxed and natural, not to over prepare, and not to take himself too seriously.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Magic in the Making or James Blond and the Ginger Whisker”
Felton acts in The Borrowers, playing the role of Peagreen, a thumb-sized person hiding with his tiny family from life-sized people. Felton loves being able to leave school early for filming and loves the gymnastics training he undergoes in order to perform the stunts for the film. Felton’s hair is permed and dyed orange for the role, which attracts good-natured teasing at his football club. He also enjoys running among the giant props designed to make him look tiny: a joyous adventure for the nine-year-old. Although he acts alongside many illustrious actors, the young Felton doesn’t have much appreciation for this honor. He learns how to behave properly on a film set but sometimes has fits of giggles that he cannot restrain even when he is instructed to. On the last day of filming, Felton is emotional. He starts crying, and to explain away his tears, he pretends that the hair and make-up assistant poked him with scissors. This is the first of many times that Felton will cry at the conclusion of filming a project.
Chapter 5 Summary: “My Brothers are Already Sick of It or Projectiles at the Premiers”
Felton is overwhelmed by the red carpet, the cameras, and the interviews at the premiere of The Borrowers. Jink drinks too much complimentary champagne, and he and Felton’s father miss much of the film as Jink vomits in a bathroom. Ash drinks too much at the afterparty and vomits in the corner of the bouncy castle. Chris accidentally knees a nine-year-old in the head.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Anna and the King or Clarice and Hannibal”
Felton is always moved by the audience’s reception of a piece of art; as an adult, he watches a five-year-old who is utterly transfixed by the musical, Matilda. The sight reminds Felton that the young are free of judgment and self-consciousness, and have the ability to simply enjoy a thing for what it is. As an adult, Felton tries to channel this positive attitude.
As a child, Felton gets a part in Anna and the King, and as a result, he and his mother live in Malaysia for four months during filming. He acts alongside Jodie Foster, who is his on-screen mother. Foster is kind and patient, even when he accidentally kicks her in the face in one scene. The young Felton sometimes feels lonely and disconnected from his friends at home during this time, but he benefits from the opportunity to meet people from all over the world.
As an adult, Felton recalls having a very bad audition for the film Hitchcock. He is cowed by the celebrity of Sir Anthony Hopkins, with whom he is to read lines, and cringes at his own attempted American accent and awkward answers to Hopkins’s questions about the character.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Potter Auditions or When Draco met Hermione”
The young Felton attends a “slightly posh” private primary (elementary) school called Cranmore, but he is uninterested in academics. When his teacher reads a book about a wizard who lives under the stairs, he does not listen. At age 11, he attends Howard of Effingham, a less illustrious school, and the normalizing influence of this more down-to-earth school plays a central role in forming his character. While trying to fit in with a troublemaking group of students, Felton develops a facade of confident arrogance.
His agent encourages him to go to an audition for Harry Potter, and he is shocked to discover that there are thousands of other children there. Chris Columbus, the director, peruses a line of 30 children, asking each one what part of the book they’re most excited to see. Felton has never read the books but tries to disguise this fact by copying a boy who spoke before him: “Can’t wait to see those Gringotts!” (64) and flaps his hands, mimicking a bird or dragon. Columbus corrects him, saying that Gringotts is a bank.
As the children mingle, Felton realizes that the crew is filming and recording them; this realization makes him feel “cocky.” A young girl approaches him and asks what the “hanging thing” (a boom mic) is. With an air of sneering condescension, Felton tells her that it means that the crew is recording them. This girl, he later learns, is Emma Watson, the actor who plays Hermione Granger and who will eventually become one of his best friends. Felton reads for the parts of Ron and Harry a few times but learns that other children have been given these parts. Then, he is called back to audition for the part of Draco Malfoy. They bleach his hair blonde to check his appearance for the role. Felton gets the part, but at the time, he is more interested in playing football with his friends.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Table Read or Kiss Kiss Kiss on the Bum”
Felton attends a table reading for the upcoming Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone film with a number of illustrious actors, including Sir Richard Smith, Dame Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Richard Griffiths, John Hurt, and Julie Waters. Fortunately, Felton doesn’t yet realize how famous many of these people are, as the knowledge would make him even more nervous.
In the introduction, Robbie Coltrane and Emma Watson humorously switch parts; Emma introduces herself as the actor of Hagrid and Robbie as Hermione. After the reading, Rick Mayall races the children to the toilet, and from these antics, Felton quickly gets the impression that even though the film is receiving major publicity, it will also be a lot of fun. Felton gets Rick Mayall (an actor whom the Felton brothers love) to sign Ash’s birthday card.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
As Felton eases into descriptions of his early acting career, several themes become apparent, the most prominent of which involves The Challenges of Navigating Fame and Fortune. While Felton is grateful for the incredible opportunities that his acting career has opened up for him, his memoir also makes it clear that he has struggled to overcome the many unexpected complications that come with celebrity status. In Chapter 1, for example, Felton’s chief motivation for shoplifting is to fit in with his friends and attempt to be “a regular teenager” (2), and it is also telling that he wonders whether the security guards “recognized the world’s most inept shoplifter as the boy from the Harry Potter films” (4) and therefore let the incident slide. By relating this early adventure on the wrong side of the law, the memoir reveals that the young Felton’s rise to celebrity status is a source of embarrassment that pushes him to do rash things so that his friends will perceive him as a normal person. This anecdote foreshadows the struggles that Felton experiences later in his life due to his fame, for as a young man, his later lifestyle of wealth and special treatment in Los Angeles leaves him feeling inauthentic and unhappy.
Despite the early indications of what will eventually become a major life struggle, the young Felton also benefits from The Central Role of Family and Friends in his life, for he praises the influence of his friends, his family, and his down-to-earth high school for their normalizing influences, which offset the surreal nature of his extensive time on the film set. For example, his brothers lovingly tease him for being the “runt of the pack” (8), and their joking treatment keeps Felton “firmly in [his] place” (9) instead of becoming completely seduced by the special attention that comes with the rise of fame. This dynamic is further illustrated when Felton attends the premiere for The Borrowers: His brothers cause mayhem by drinking too much and accidentally injuring children on the jumping castle. Through these incidents, Felton is cast as the youngest brother of a rabble of typically boundary-pushing teenaged boys, and as a result, his strongest memories of the event are more focused on their antics than on the event’s central purpose of celebrating and recognizing the actors who starred in a major movie. This impression is further strengthened by his parents’ pragmatic roles in wrangling their four boys during the premiere, for as Felton relates, rather than being cast as the adoring father of a child star, his father “stood outside the cubicle, suited and booted, while Jink heaved his guts out” (47): a far-from-glamorous image that serves to inject a dose of reality into the situation.
Within his “close-knit, loving, chaotic, and supportive” (8) family, Felton emphasizes his mother’s role as a supportive caregiver; he believes that her dedication to enabling him to pursue his ambitions is a major factor in his professional success. Felton’s mother encourages him to try any and all of the hobbies that catch his attention, advocating for Felton to his more frugal father. Critically, Felton is never pressured to become an actor; instead, his parents simply support him in whatever passions he chooses. Looking back at his formative years, he is confident that he would still have his mother’s support “being a professional violinist, or ice hockey goalkeeper, or an extreme yoyoist” (16) if he had not chosen to become an actor.
With these humorous family anecdotes, Felton characterizes his younger self as being humble and down-to-earth about his early acting roles, and this trend is further highlighted when his descriptions wryly describe his initial ineptitude as an actor. For example, he says of one of his earliest roles, “I was given the artistically fulfilling and technically arduous role of “Snowman Number Three” (23). Rather than establishing himself as an instant talent, these self-deprecating anecdotes emphasize Felton’s perception of the importance of luck and timing in his path to becoming a rich and famous actor, and he openly admits, “I’d shown no special talents on those Wednesdays after school” (24). This self-deprecation is typical of Felton’s style, thus introducing The Importance of Playfulness and Humility as a pivotal theme.
This playfulness continues as Felton emphasizes the silliness and fun of The Borrowers set and contrasts its whimsical nature with the tone of some of his adult auditions, during which he became cowed and nervous in more illustrious company. Unlike his earlier performances, he notes that being so keenly aware of the possibility of failure among such a crowd would cause him to perform poorly, thereby fulfilling his own fears. To counter these setbacks, Felton bookends Chapter 6 with opposing anecdotes to illustrate his belief in the importance of unselfconscious playfulness. Felton draws on the memory of a young boy watching the musical Matilda with unrestrained adoration and total absorption. Felton is moved by this sight, asserting that the boy “was too young to be a critic and it reminded me of that time before I had succumbed to the adult tyranny of judgment and self-consciousness” (50). Felton contrasts this moment with his awkward Hitchcock audition, stating, “My stomach turned over. I was bricking it, horribly aware that I didn’t know the script” (56). From these contrasting experiences, Felton learns that he performs best when he reconnects with his happy-go-lucky younger self, who appreciated and enjoyed art in a grounded and unselfconscious way, rather than when he overthinks the moment and worries about his performance quality.
In these chapters, Felton’s nonchalant tone adds humor as he reflects on his younger self’s indifference to the growing success of the Harry Potter books in the years leading up to his audition for a role in the films. As his teacher reads to the students about “a boy wizard living under the stairs” (60)—which the reader will recognize as a reference to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—Felton uses the moment to illustrate how bored his younger self was with the story, mischievously stating, “A boy wizard? Not my cup of tea” (60). Additionally, he uses his younger self’s ignorance of the book series to create another moment of humor during the anecdote of the audition, for his awkward exclamation, “Can’t wait to see those Gringotts!” (64) creates a sharp contrast between his own lack of familiarity and the encyclopedic knowledge that the other child actors display. Tellingly, he doesn’t even read the books when he is called back to read for the part of Draco Malfoy; this attitude suggests that his nonchalant confidence almost borders on arrogance, a trait that fits well with the character he is being called to portray. Thus, Felton clearly takes a whimsical pleasure in imbuing the descriptions of his younger self with several of the attributes that are so notable in the character of Draco Malfoy. As he states, “the filmmakers weren’t so much looking for actors; they were looking for people who were these characters” (68). Felton’s aloof and slightly rude demeanor, which is further emphasized when he first addresses Emma Watson, reveals that his childlike cockiness actually made him the perfect choice for the now-iconic role in which he was cast. Further humor is created through Felton’s obvious ignorance about the extent to which the films will change his life. When his mother calls him with the news of his casting in the role which will bring him millions of pounds and international recognition, he responds in typical nonchalant fashion, impatient to get back to his football game with his friend: “Cool. […]This should be fun. […] Um, can I go now, Mum? I’m 2-1 down” (70). Thus, The Importance of Playfulness and Humility takes on central significance in his early life.
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