The Irish Times has posted a new interview with Evanna Lynch where she discusses Potter, her future in acting and gaining confidence! A snippet from the interview may be read below, read the full interview at the Irish Times.

At 14 years of age, she snagged a role thousands of girls dreamed of, stepping into a colossal film franchise with millions of fans around the world. “At the time it was ‘I want to play Luna Lovegood, I want to be in the Harry Potter films,’” she says, as opposed to wanting to be an actor. She had already auditioned for another gig though, a short Irish film called 34A, “about girls who wanted to have big boobs.” The Harry Potter experience has undoubtedly changed the course of her life. The 22-year-old from Termonfeckin in Louth now speaks with an LA lilt and the kind of measured detachment that young actors exhibit.

When she reflects on it now, she can talk with some perspective about her life changing instantly. “I got a lot of independence,” she begins, mentioning how school became tutoring in England. “At 16 I was living by myself and getting up and going to work and all that, and doing school. So there was that juggling of normal life and adult life, like working in the real world.” Her friends didn’t change, her family didn’t either, but people were “more interested in me, I suppose . . . I think the biggest change was personally, I had to come out of myself.” She wasn’t too great at being herself. Interviews were a disaster, she’d just sit there, scared and answer “yes?” “I didn’t know how to ‘be’. It really scared me.”

Talking to actors on set, especially the older ones such as Alan Rickman, was intimidating. But she forced herself to come out of herself, recognising that unless she got good at existing in that context, she’d miss some of the best experiences related to it. She says she was like a little mouse, afraid of everything, “so yeah, it forced me to grow up quicker.”

It sounds like quite the ordeal. It’s hard to imagine a quiet teenage girl away from home, friends, family, thrust into a sort of superstardom. But the challenge was also a blessing, she says. “If I hadn’t gone through that, I probably would have gone through school and gone through college, but I still would have struggled with confidence.”

Acting has taught her that confidence is about putting yourself out there, that when no one else believes in you, you draw resolve from a well within. She thinks her insecurity comes from a collage of things, “personality” being one. “I have two sisters and a brother, and everyone was good at what they did, was very competitive, so yeah, I always felt that I had to try hard to make people like me or impress me. That was just a thing I had from childhood.” And with that insecurity, “it’s not like it switches off when you get something. You think, when I succeed at this exam or when I get into this college or when I get a boyfriend, then I’ll be confident, then I’ll be happy. But you’re never. You’re always searching for the next thing, and you’re always afraid that someone’s going to pull the rug out from under you, and you’ll be just . . . you’ll be back at square one.”