Michael Gambon Messed Up a Complicated ‘Harry Potter’ Scene to Prank This A-List Star
Harry Potter star Michael Gambon was known to be a bit less serious than his character Dumbledore. The actor’s habit of joking around on set once messed with the performance of his A-List co-star.
How Michael Gambon messed up this ‘Harry Potter’ scene
Some of the older actors in the Harry Potter series could be just as much pranksters as their younger co-stars. The Dumbledore actor himself had a knack for making Daniel Radcliffe laugh. Sometimes, Gambon would come off so hysterical that Radcliffe had trouble pulling himself together to shoot a particular scene.
“Michael Gambon could do that to a frustrating degree. He learned that he could, when I was a teenager, he could make me laugh very, very easily. Making me laugh right up until the word ‘action,’ at which point I was pretty much unable to recover and he could just snap into a performance with inherent gravitas and charm. Yeah. He’s awesome,” Radcliffe said to GQ not too long ago.
There was one prank Gambon pulled on Radcliffe with late actor Alan Rickman that stood out. The scene in question was in the middle of a complicated and important Harry Potter scene that involved Gambon’s Dumbledore.
“There’s – in the 3rd film – there’s a shot in the great hall of all the kids sleeping in the great hall, and the camera starts very very wide, and comes in so that it’s an inch from my face, a very long developing set, yeah, and Alan Rickman decided he would plant one of those fart machines in my, uh, sleeping bag, and they waited until like -the camera had come in for this huge DRAMATIC developing shot, and then unleashed this tremendous noise in the great hall,” Radcliffe said on a Reddit AMA.
Radcliffe initially thought it was one of the younger actors who did the prank.
“But as it turns out, it was one of the members of Britain’s acting royalty. I think I laughed a lot, was probably a bit embarrassed, but it was really really funny,” he said.
Michael Gambon felt the ‘Harry Potter’ series struck gold with Daniel Radcliffe
Gambon was very impressed by Radcliffe’s acting when he saw the young star perform.
“The day they found Daniel, they struck gold,” Gambon once said according to uInterview.
Perhaps what made Gambon’s compliment more impressive was how Radcliffe was cast in the wizard series in the first place. Radcliffe had extremely little experience in front of the camera before he became Harry Potter. According to casting director Janet Hirshenson, he was done with acting before he was hired.
“He just wasn’t interested. He didn’t want to be an actor anymore,” Hirshenson once recalled to HuffPost.
But Radcliffe decided to audition for the film series on a whim after a chance encounter with the film’s producer.
“One evening, David Heyman, the producer, went to the theater and he knew Daniel’s father, who was an agent … so the producer ran into Daniel and his dad and said to Daniel, ‘Why don’t you come in and audition? Think about it.’ So he said, ‘OK,’” Hirshenson said.
Michael Gambon got a note from J.K. Rowling stating that he played Dumbledore like a Hippie
Gambon didn’t have the same second guesses inheriting the role of Dumbledore from late actor Richard Harris. The veteran was offered the part through a simple phone call.
“They rang me up and said, ‘Will you do it?’ Like any other job I said, ‘Sure,’” recalled Gambon. “Then you find yourself in the middle of this thing.”
But Gambon soon discovered that author J.K. Rowling had some interesting notes regarding his take on the character. Gambon simply took Rowling’s comments as a compliment.
“When I took over, I was very anxious. I got a note from J.K. Rowling. She just said, ‘He seems like a bit of a hippie,’” Gambon recalled. “Which I thought was good, she didn’t seem to mind that.”
