Ralph Fiennes. And while he was decent Voldemort, I always thought he could do a lot better if he wanted to. I also never image him as older Tom Riddle, choosing Daniel Day-Lewis for this role in my mind.

Bonnie Wright was a big miscast not because of her looks, but lack of charisma and noticeable presence. You blink and you miss her.

But HP cast was more often than not spot on. Neville, Draco, Lucius, Bellatrix, Umbridge (maybe not in looks, but Imelda Staunton knew how to make us hate her) and so on.

Actually, aside Ginny, only Narcissa never worked for me. Helen McCrory is a good actress, but every since I heard early rumors about Naomi Watts playing this role, she stayed in my mind as a perfect choice for it.

 

I never liked how Tonks was portrayed in the movies.

 

After watching Ralph Fiennes in Coriolanus, I realized how much better the movies could have been. Fiennes communicated with the viewer with raw passion and earnest emotion in that movies. I realize JKR is not Shakespear but still, I feel that Fiennes's performance as Lord Voldemort fell well short of standard. Voldemort was supposed to be a smooth talking charismatic leader. Instead we got a screaming maniac.

 

You're not - I've ranted about this myself once or twice. Rickman was great, and in many ways he nailed it. But he (and/or the screenwriters) were missing an important element of his characterization. You saw it most in the books at the end of PoA, the end of HBP, and to some degree after Snape confronted Harry in "Snape's Worst Memory" of OotP.

In those bits, Snape wasn't merely angry. He completely lost his shit. He lost it when Sirius escaped, he lost it when Harry called him a coward, and he lost it when Harry saw the memory.

It's hard to express how important those short moments were for defining Snape's character. They were moments when you could see through Snape's cool, collected facade (i.e. the part that was the entire body of Rickman's portrayal in the first six movies), to the bitter, self-hating man beneath.

To be fair I have to give Rickman credit for showing some decent anguish in his DH memory scenes. But I think it was too late to start doing this. Oh well.

 

What Portus and enembee said.

For a character that only appeared in the movies, and not the books, she was okay.

McCrory was originally supposed to be Bellatrix, but her pregnancy interfered. I don't think she suited Narcissa, and the weird compromise they did with the stripes in her hair just didn't work for me.

I never liked how Tonks was portrayed in the books, after OoTP. She wasn't in the movies long enough to make a difference, either way, unfortunately for Natalia Tena.

In a lot of ways, Snape quit growing, quit maturing as a person after his friendship with Lily went belly up.

He stayed there in his angry little place, hating himself on the inside, and blaming everyone but himself (namely James, either directly or by proxy via Harry) on the outside.

After that, he became truly involved with the death eaters, only becoming a smaller and more loathsome person in the process, until he realized he'd doomed Lily with his colossal fuck-up, as if that ship hadn't already sailed when he started backing someone who kills the very same kind of people as the girl he called 'mudblood'.

Apparently he was either very stupid, or naively believed that his weighty position among the death eaters (that of an antisocial, penniless, halfblood with neither looks, charisma, nor history, but knowing a few new potions tricks) would be enough to save Lily from Voldemort's wrath... and that she'd accept his version of sanctuary after he'd sold her husband, son, and people down the river.

He goes straight from one master to another (parents/headmaster/Voldemort/headmaster), and so he always has someone else he can blame for his behavior. And, conveniently, the last one is his old headmaster, which really drives home the way Snape never grew, emotionally, beyond being an angry high school boy. He never really matures, he just grows just more sullen and bitter.

He substitutes being in a position of authority over what he sees as the same group of people who shit on him in school, for actual adulthood. He, perhaps, showed some growth and actual bravery in his last year of life... but he also died still following the orders of his school's headmaster: The perpetually angry and immature schoolboy following the orders of his professor/hit-and-miss substitute conscience, still forcing him to do the right thing when he wouldn't do it himself.... or wasn't even capable of recognizing what the right things was, without someone rubbing his big nose in it like a bad dog.

He clearly had a sort of bookish intelligence, and even a glimmer of innovation, but he never had the emotional maturity to make him a well-rounded human being. Call him the dark Hermione: Where he let his hygiene go to hell, alienated the one person trying to treat him well, and joined up with the bad crowd, Hermione kept washing her hair, kept trying to make friends, and turned out okay... instead of an intelligent but intolerable person hiding in her old school and using her authority over helpless children as a substitute for maturity and earned respect... and as a chance for petty revenge against an internal litany of slights she feels were made against her.

The main differences, pre-Hogwarts, are that Snape had an abusive father and a good friend, and Hermione had decent parents and presumably no friends... and, once they attended school, their parental (dis)advantages were rendered moot.

And, we see where they ended up.

Meh, I didn't think much of the way they showed him cradling Lily's dead body.

A: Didn't happen!
B: Unfortunate Implications.

KHAAAAAAAAAAN!! From hell's heart, I stab at thee. Lay off the eyebrows... or I'll get ya!

 

Warlocke with one of the best posts I've seen in weeks.

 

Why, thank you, good sir.

Hating Snape just comes naturally to me. Thankfully, I have a lot of well-thought-out and hopefully logical reasons for what would otherwise be an irrational vendetta.

:fire

 

Dude, come on. Irrational vendettas without logic or reason are the best kind.

 

But to be fair, as someone who will defend Snape more than most, that entire digression is kind of brilliant and it completely works.

It also kind of defines one of the reasons why I don't think Alan Rickman quite worked as Snape for me all the way through the movies - namely because Alan Rickman has a certain dignity and mature presence that he maintains at all times, and there are points in the novels where Snape clearly doesn't have that.

 

Warlocke: I don't think you give Snape enough credit where it's due mentally and magically. You say he has a glimmer of innovation... that's a supreme understatement. The Half-Blood Prince showed a level of prodigious talent not seen in anyone but Voldemort or Dumbledore. He basically rewrote the potion's text for his generation, made multiple spells with powerful effects that saved the trio many times in the seventh book, and was so talented in the mind arts that he hid his intentions from Voldemort for decades.

I agree on all of your other points, but really... He was a man without the social or moral substance to achieve greatness, but everything else was there.

 

And you had to ask this question why?

Yes, in a way. Even before the first movie was released JKR mentioned that she spoke with Rickman about Snape's past and that he knew things about his character no one else knew yet.

I always thought this was about his loyality to Dumbledore, but with OotP I guessed that it was about his relationship to Lily as well.

 

Radcliffe casting was far from normal actually. His parents are casting agents (if I remember well) and when they saw the ad for the first movie they told Radcliffe that he wouldn't do an audition for it. Their reasons being that they knew what it entails in term of work, commitment, etc. and that they didn't feel like their son was ready for something so big, so young.

The director of the first HP movie wanted to contact him when he saw his photo on his actors list or something like that, but his secretary told him that the parents had already said no.

Radcliffe went to see a play with his parents when they stumbled across the Producer (I think) who had already worked with Radcliffe's dad. During the whole play he couldn't help but think that he wanted to cast Radcliffe as Harry.

Producer then went and contact Radcliffe's father the next day and managed to talk him into letting his son audition for the role, telling him that he would make everything in his power to keep the children protected through the process.

Radcliffe did an audition...and won. So technically, it wasn't because of his parents that he was taken.

 

Radcliffe's casting is only an issue for me because he was and remains a pretty shite actor. The worst in every movie, which is shocking considering he is the main role.

Nepotism is a reality in showbiz. The whole industry works around who you know rather than what, I accept that. The fact is there are hundreds of people talented enough to play that role well. So out of the choice of hundreds I don't really care if you pick the one you have connections to. I do however have an issue when you pick outside of the talented simply due to a connection.

It is actually a point of shame for me when you consider what american child actors are capable of (Hailey Joel Osment, Dakota Fanning, Henry Thomas, Isabella Fuhram e.t.c). British filming was given an incredible opportunity with Harry Potter. A massive franchise giving a chance to showcase the best of british talent. In no way shape or form is that Daniel Radcliffe. Honestly I think Freddie Highmore could have done better. Hell I think Tom Felton (who originally auditioned for HP) would be better.

@Basilisk -I really doubt Radcliffe was the best. I was young when I saw the first film and I still immediately pegged his performance as terrible. He did improve but not enough nor quickly. It wasn't until half-blood prince that I didn't find him cringe worthy.

 

The thing is it's easy to make judgements like this now after the fact, but they had to decide based on how good they were at the age of 10/11. So while it's easy to say in hindsight that such and such would have been better, back then no one had heard of them. Maybe they didn't audition, or maybe they had a bad audition, or maybe they just didn't look right. But at the time Radcliffe must have been the best choice. Overall I think that they did quite well to get a cast of mostly solid child actors.

 

@Hw597: I agree that Radcliffe was far from being the best actor in the first film. He even admitted it himself: ''...I think the reason I probably got the part - because I'm not as good an actor as Emma or Rupert in it at all - was how confident and unfazed by the whole thing I seemed to be.''

Concerning his choice of Harry, Columbus said: ''David and I wanted a kid who seemed to have a haunted quality. There was something even in Dan's most raw performances. ''

I'm not saying there was not connections involved and what not, but I still think they did a good job in casting Harry and they certainly feel the same thing. And I guess, in the end, it comes to the fact that it's their job to select who they think is the best actor for whatever role and they probably know their shit better than you or I.

 

I'd love to have casting agent parents who happened to have worked with the producers of the HP films before and have people say I won it fairly. That'd be fuckin' awesome.

Fact is, other kids could have done a better job and looked the part more than Radcliffe if only because of the sheer volume of people that would have auditioned for it.

I actually like Radcliffe. I do think that in most scenes in the movies he did a horrible job but I can't know who would have done better at the respective ages. He also seems like a really nice guy albeit less well adjusted to normal society than Emma Watson or Rupert Grint (And Grint owns a Hovercraft and an ice cream truck ffs.)

Personally, he's the role I'm least pleased with in all the movies which is a big deal. We've hashed out this conversation before though and I think we've all agreed to look past his "emotional" performances in films like PoA (WEIRDRAAAAAAAGE) and HBP (ISNIFFLELIKEFUCK.).

 

I actually thought Radcliffe was okay. Not great, especially during the emotional scenes, but given the casting age they could have done worse.

Besides, there is no Dan Radcliffe, there is only Harry Potter.

 

I agree with pretty much all of this. Radcliffe should be nowhere near the Harry Potter movies and shat all over the role, but I genuinely like the guy in interviews and such. Radcliffe as Radcliffe > Radcliffe as Potter.

 

Yup first thing, make sure that the new face of your seven film (did they know it was seven back then, it could have easily been longer) billion dollar franchise isn't a fucking wreck, regardless of talent.

 

I get your point but at the same time that is there job. We are talking a multimillion pound project there isn't really an excuse for getting it wrong. The audition process was very extensive. I remember hearing Emma Watson on Jonathon Ross where she made a bit of a slip up. She described how the whole cast got to know each other during the multiple (like five, six) elimination auditions. She then made the mistake of mentioning that Daniel wasn't part of those and he joined latter, separately. Perhaps if he had gone through the same process of multiple auditions they would have spotted any issues.
As well the point is america get it right so consistently with there big budget films, why shouldn't we.

I just want to make clear I have no issue with Radcliffe as a person. I think he is a well rounded decent guy. I just get slightly angry when I hear facts like him having earned ~£20 million throughout the movies. There is absolutely no way his performance is deserving of that kind of money. I also happen to know some incredibly talented actors who struggle to find small roles. A girl "B" that I know was acting from 9, she has such trouble finding roles over here she taught herself french and so that she could take roles both here and there. Admittedly she is a bit of a dickhead but I put my hands up that she is a very talented dickhead.