Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the Potter films, recently discussed his post-Potter career in a new interview with Digital Spy.  Since being in Potter, Harry has appeared in numerous stage plays as well as his own one-man show (which will be going to London next year after a successful run in New York.)  His newest project is another play, The Angry Brigade, which runs from September 19 to October 4 at The Drum, Theatre Royal Plymouth. Read the full interview here and some snippets below.

His new play The Angry Brigade takes him back to the 1970s

“It’s a great piece of theatre I think, the writing is exceptional: so full and brimming with ideas. Paines Plough are such a great company to work for. I’ve always wanted to work with them because I love all the new writing stuff they do, and James Graham is a brilliant, brilliant writer.

“I play quite a few [characters]. In the second act I play a guy called Jim, he was one of the Angry Brigaders, one of the Stoke Newington 8. He went to Cambridge where he met John Barker, who’s a fellow Angry Brigader. And they just got bored of the way the world ran really, and they tried to change it. Especially in Britain they were bored of the government, and the types of people that were running the country, and how the country was organized… they just didn’t want to be a part of it.”

“I think it’s extremely funny because James’s writing is always very funny. It’s extremely sharp, the wit is very clever, very witty. But also there’s some really heart-breaking scenes, you see their relationships corrode and you see them splintering. So it’s constantly going between those two things, from being very funny to going very serious. It’s a time in history that was kept under wraps. So that’s what is fizzing underneath this production: the need to tell this story.”

He still looks back fondly on his time in the Harry Potter universe

“It was so many years of doing it. And although I wasn’t on the yearly commitment that perhaps the others were on – because they were needed throughout the year for the shoot – I think maybe I got the best of both worlds. Allowing myself to live in the same world as movie making and then try and get back to school.

“I was very lucky in that sense. I had a great time, I learned a lot. It was a wonderful experience. It’s kind of odd to talk about it because it’s like talking about your childhood, it’s sometimes quite slippery what you remember and what you don’t remember. But I just remember it being such a blast.”