Being one of the leads in a blockbuster series could set an actor off nicely onto a solid career, but despite the success of the “Harry Potter” franchise, Rupert Grint almost threw in the towel.
Grint, who portrayed Harry's red-haired best friend, Ron Weasley, in all eight of the blockbuster films, recently admitted that he felt it was "too late" to forge a name for himself in Hollywood that didn't have a connection to the wizarding world.
Starting at a young age and playing the same character through all the films, Grunt told the New York Times he found the role “suffocating” after a while; and further, he wasn’t sure he was cut out for any future roles.
In addition to conflicted feelings about securing any new characters, Grint admitted that being a "private person, an introvert," didn't help the situation.
According to Cinemablend, on the last day shooting the final Potter installment, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,” Grint drove off set in a colorful ice cream truck and considered the idea of selling ice cream for a living.
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Though there were numerous acting offers that did start to pop up post-Potter, according to Grint, they all fell into a similar “sidekick” situation that didn’t interest him.
Eventually, he landed a role in a play on London’s West End and a major part in the Crackle series, “Snatch.” But it was his role in M. Night Shyamalan’s recent horror series for Apple+, “Servant,” that has brought him back to a limelight, if not the mega-profile of "Harry Potter."
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The show is a characteristically creepy and complicated spookshow with Grint tapped for the role of Julian, the brother of a woman who hires a mysterious nanny to take care of her and her husband’s realistic baby doll. Does it need to be said that things get much weirder than that?
The show’s odd premise has grabbed enough eyeballs to have been recently renewed for a fourth and final season.
This time Grint seems to have found more fulfillment in the familiar, as he has worked again with Shyamalan on the director’s latest film, “Knock at the Cabin,” the first feature film Grint will have starred in in six years.
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