The Telegraph has a new interview out with Harry Melling who plays Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films!  It is a wonderful interview with a lot of information we never knew about Harry.

“It was nearly two years ago,” he says, refusing the offer of breakfast. “I was doing a show at the National Youth Theatre, playing an old man. Before that I had played fat clowns and I thought, ‘If I want to have the career I would like, I am going to have to lose weight.’ I was just starting drama school, and found I was moving around a lot. I also started to eat sensibly. The weight just dropped off. I went from 16st to 11st 5lb.”

His illustrator mother, Joanna Troughton, was keen to give Harry a chance, too. “She sent off my photos to the producers of the Potter films when I was 10, thinking I might be an extra. A year later I was asked to read for Dudley. When I got the part, I thought: ‘Ooh, I’m in a film’, not that I was cast as fat and ugly.'”  Wasn’t being associated with the hateful Dudley a curse? “I kept quiet about it. Nobody ever recognised me.”He minded more about not being one of the Hogwarts’ children. When people asked him about the films, and what Michael Gambon or Julie Walters were like, he would have to say, “Dunno, I’ve never met them.” But, stuck in Privet Drive, he did get to work with Richard Griffiths and Fiona Shaw, who play Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, Dudley’s parents. “Just watching them was an education. Fiona taught me a Caliban speech, which I later used to get into drama school.”

In the meantime, he had changed almost beyond recognition, to the producers’ alarm. “They did this double-take, ‘Oh my God, we are going to have to do something,’ and I felt very guilty. They could have recast, but instead they padded me out.”  The seventh film, the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, won’t be out until next year. But Melling has plenty of work to keep him busy as the simple-minded son of Mother Courage – and with Fiona Shaw as his fictional mother once again.  “I always thought he would be a marvellous character actor,” Shaw says, “but he’s turned into a marvellous leading actor. Suddenly I feel I’m looking at Hamlet.”

You go Harry!! 😀