We’re meeting just days after the news of Robbie Coltrane’s passing, and Felton accepts my condolences: “I know that he’d be having a little chuckle right now about us talking about our memories,” he says of his costar. In person, Felton is alternately giddy and nervous, boyishly pulling the sleeves of his cardigan up over his wrists as he orders a mac and cheese with a Coca-Cola, and then rolling them back down again to profess his love for Hamilton (he’s seen it 11 times on the West End) or show me a video of his brother’s new litter of puppies (“They are absolutely, utterly useless,” he sighs admiringly). That sandy blond is his natural color; let anyone interested in the Malfoy hair regimen know that it required bleaching every nine days, and he’s happy to never do it again (“I should have no follicles left on my scalp!”).
Still, throughout our lunch, I truly can’t tell how much of Felton’s affect—the Slytherin phone case, the casual mention of his plans to hang out with Daniel (as in Radcliffe) later—is supposed to be on the nose as Easter eggs designed to titillate fans, rather than basic everyday seepage of your typical post–Harry Potter career. Surely, he knows what he’s doing, right?
Take, for example, the way Felton’s memoir tackles the internet’s obsession over his friendship with Emma Watson: Felton swears he’s oblivious to all that parasocial will-they-or-won’t-they analysis that Potterheads have dedicated to recirculated interview clips and a particularly well-traveled video of the pair, as adults, cutely sharing a skateboard as they glide down the Venice Beach boardwalk. The way Felton puts it, Watson just happened to be encouraging of his writing efforts, so he just happened to ask her to write the book’s foreword, where Watson just happens to assure the world that she and Felton have “loved each other in a special way” and that “what we have is far deeper” than any garden-variety romance. One couldn’t dangle a juicier bone to the netizens unless you really were that oblivious—or, perhaps, quite shrewd about your target audience.
Courtesy of Grand Central Publishing.
In a chapter literally titled “Dramione,” Felton uses the storied skateboarding lesson as an example of how comparatively low-key his experience of fame has been in the aftermath of the Potter films. Following his post-Hogwarts success in Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, he’d moved to LA at the urging of Jason Isaacs and Alan Radcliffe (Daniel’s dad) to pursue acting, which didn’t come easily. “Auditioning as a 12-year-old is basically: Walk in, stand on the line, and if you look remotely like the thing they’re after, that’s it,” Felton tells me. “Whereas suddenly, I was 21 years old in a waiting room with 25 other actors doing their vocal warm-ups and push-ups on the floor.”
As Felton reveals near the end of the memoir, that venture into Hollywood culminated with a jarring intervention from family and friends concerned about, as he describes, “my drinking and my substance abuse”; the end of his long-term relationship with actor and stunt assistant Jade Olivia (who he’d met on the Harry Potter set); and an existential reckoning fueled by one night’s attempt to escape from rehab on foot. “I got a bit distracted with what’s important in life,” Felton says in reference to those years. But by age 31, he’d found his footing again, living in Venice Beach and enjoying the anonymity of being a “bearded weirdo with a tan”—that is, until Watson came to visit, and they got mobbed on the boardwalk. “I’ve been lucky enough for my life not to be as intense,” Felton reflects. “Every time someone stops me and says hello, I’m sort of reminded like, oh, yeah, I was in those films, like 20 years ago. So my relationship is relatively passive and friendly.” He adds, “Muggle Tom gets to walk around quite a lot.”