Bonnie Wright knows the Harry Potter movies didn't do Ginny justice

If you had to choose the most underserved character in the Harry Potter film franchise, Ginny Weasley is a top contender, and Bonnie Wright—the actor who played her—knows it. As Book Ginny evolved into a character with at least some semblance of a personality while Movie Ginny remained essentially one dimensional, Wright felt “anxiety” about doing justice to a role fans felt passionate about. “[Especially] when, inevitably, a lot of the scenes of every character were chopped down from the book to the film,” she notes on the latest episode of Michael Rosenbaum’s “Inside of You” podcast. “So you didn’t really have as much to show in the film.”

“Sometimes that was a little disappointing, because there were parts of the character that just didn’t get to come through because there weren’t the scenes to do that,” Wright continues. “That made me feel a bit anxious or just frustrated, I guess.”

Wright never brought up these frustrations with producers, probably because she was a very young woman in the middle of a gargantuan production, and also because “There was no room for much change in those scripts.” Still, she felt anxiety “about, ‘Oh, I’m going to be seen as badly portraying this character,” she says. Later, she realized “that I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do that. So it wasn’t really my fault, exactly.”

The Harry Potter franchise had a unique commitment to retaining its principal cast from the very beginning through to the end, which more or less paid off with the “Golden Trio” of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint. In Wright’s case, she was cast at age nine before anyone ever knew that her character was Harry Potter’s future bride. (Her only line in Sorcerer’s Stone was given to her by director Christopher Columbus on the day of shooting.) Wright didn’t grow up to have… well… any chemistry with Radcliffe, but whether you blame that on a fault in her acting or a lack of screen time to develop the relationship is up to you.

Wright says most fans don’t tend to blame her for it. “When fans do share that disappointment… they do it in a way that is like, ‘We know it wasn’t you. We just wanted more of you.’ And that’s the same of every character. If only they could be five-hour-long movies.” Well, if that Harry Potter television series does indeed materialize at Max, maybe Ginny will finally get her day in the sun.