School’s out, wizards! After a decade of playing Hogwarts students, the cast of the Harry Potter movies has finally graduated. Part I of the final film installment hit screens last week, and Part II is set for a July release.
Stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint are said to have shed tears on the last day of filming. But Tom Felton, who’s played Potter’s pale nemesis Draco Malfoy all these years, is relieved to finally step off of the set where he quite literally grew up.
Movie stardom has drawbacks, Felton told Britain’s Daily Mail: Schoolmates teased him. He was contractually bound to avoid the sun for 10 years. And heaps of money — combined with teenage naïveté — got him into trouble with the tax man.
“One thing that people [say] to me is that the wealth and the fame must have made up for missing out on my childhood,” said Felton, who dismisses the idea as ridiculous. “You will never get those years back, and you can’t put a price on them.”
Indeed, young stardom is a precarious state of being. Some actors, like Natalie Portman and Neil Patrick Harris, spin early fame into brilliant careers; others, like Lindsay Lohan and Corey Haim, spin out of control before they’re even old enough to legally see their own R-rated flicks.