“Harry Potter” producers might be scrambling to find a magic wand that can wave this story away.
Actress Jessie Cave, who played Lavender Brown in the "Harry Potter" franchise of fantasy films, recently admitted that she felt degraded on set after she put on a few pounds.
Cave appeared in the “The Half-Blood Prince” and the two “Deathly Hallows” specifically. After being killed out of the series, Cave has become a successful comedian and author.
In a recent interview with The Independent, on the arrival of her new comedic novel, Sunset, she opened up about some bad vibes she got while filming the two Potter epics.
According to the NME, Cave said, “I gained a lot of weight after doing Harry Potter...I wasn’t starving myself. I was growing up and people tend to gain weight as they get older. That’s just what happens. So I did.”
“And so going back to the last film[s],” she flatly states, “I was treated like a different species.”
Describing the ensuing negative attention, she called it “horrible,” and further explained “It wasn’t a time where actresses were any bigger than size eight… you get a bit bigger, or you’re not as relevant, and it goes off, and you have to make your way in the dark. I definitely felt invisible.”
“Since then, it’s definitely made me have weird issues with weight and work,” she admits.
Cave had to deal with even more intense trauma last January when her then 3-month old son tested positive for COVID-19, after an already hard birth, and had to be hospitalized.
The “Harry Potter” situation was traumatic enough for Cave to ditch acting altogether and focus on her writing and illustration.
“If I’d stayed thin -- unnaturally thin, unhappily thin -- I would have probably got more acting roles, and then I wouldn’t have started writing,” she said. “And then I don’t know who I would be now because writing is who I am. I’m almost grateful that I gained all that weight.”
Pretty sure that bit of trivia won’t come up on the new “Harry Potter” quiz show or 20th anniversary retrospective special, coming to HBO Max later this year.
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