Helena Bonham Carter Once Shared She Found Waving a Wand in ‘Harry Potter’ Emasculating
Harry Potter recruited veteran star Helena Bonham Carter to portray Bellatrix Lestrange in the wizard series. But she admitted that it wasn’t easy at first trying to be intimidating while waving a stick around.
What Helena Bonham Carter felt about waving her ‘Harry Potter’ wand
Bonham Carter took her wand-waving seriously in the Harry Potter franchise. Not only did she practice extensively with the prop, but she went to school for it as well.
“We went to wand school for about three weeks,” Bonham Carter once told Entertainment Weekly. “We took it very very seriously. I actually got a wand blister on the [middle] finger. They kind of had different names for all the different moves, Latin ones. It was sort of based on fencing. You also always have to have an intention behind the spell.”
But being able to convincingly cast spells through a wand proved to be somewhat difficult for the actor.
“You just feel totally emasculated on set when you’re waving a bit a wood around and nothing’s coming from it. It’s very difficult to remember that you’ve actually got the intention to kill behind it. It’s not all fun and laughs; it’s actually quite hard work,” she said.
But this soon changed after she saw the destructive power of her wand on film.
“I actually pointed my wand and it blew up! The power! The power was just like Angry Birds, but big [as] life,” she said.
Helena Bonham Carter enjoyed torturing Emma Watson’s character in ‘Harry Potter’
Bonham Carter was more than eager to join the cast of Harry Potter. She made her first Potter appearance in Order of the Phoenix, although she wasn’t the filmmaker’s first choice. Initially, they went with another actor. But after the original choice became pregnant, Bonham Carter was thrilled to nab the part.
“So they came to me,” she said. “And I loved it. I love magic, I love witches, I love the whole [Harry Potter] world. I was all too happy to play a witch.”
However, Bonham Carter also got to play Emma Watson on a technicality. In one of the movies, there’s a scene where Watson’s Hermione Granger finds herself morphing into Bonham Carter’s Bellatrix.
“Rather than put Emma Watson in a hell of a load of make-up, they just said, ‘Now you go act like Hermione’. That was fun,” Bonham-Carter once told MTV News (via Contact Music).
She felt it was incredibly entertaining torturing Hermione in the feature. But Bonham Carter’s much younger co-stars also had a lot of fun with the swap.
“I was looking at Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint and they were treating me as if I was 17,” she said.
Helena Bonham Carter brought her ‘Harry Potter’ character to life
As excited as Bonham Carter was to play Bellatrix, she noticed the character had little going for her in the script. But this was because Bellatrix didn’t have much personality in the source material, either. She brought her reservations regarding the role to the movie’s director David Yates. Afterwards, Bonham Carter decided to bring her own creativity to the role.
“I think I probably made her a bit more insane and unhinged then she was meant to be,” she said. “I wanted to be conspicuous. So the [rotten] teeth was my idea, because she had been in prison so long. I wanted her to be quite savage. And I wanted that corset. It was sort of an Amazon thing. Bellatrix means a warrior. I wanted her to be sexy and revolting at the same time. At one point she might have been attractive, but no longer.”
Perhaps Bonham Carter’s most significant contribution to Bellatrix was the character’s frazzled hairdo. But this served a functional purpose as well, as it shortened her time on the make-up chair.
“Here’s the thing: If you have messy hair, you don’t have to worry all the time about making it all perfect. It was a lot to do with keeping [all the hair and makeup people] away,” she said.
