James Phelps talks about golf, moving on from “Harry Potter” at MBE Inaugural Celebrity Golf Classic

by · May 28, 2013

Sportsvibe took the time to interview James Phelps at the recent Mike Tindall MBE Inaugural Celebrity Golf Classic, and the star had a lot to say about his time playing Fred Weasley in the Harry Potter films, including working with renowned British actors and realizing that his character had died.

You have been lucky enough to be in films with the great and the good of British acting. Anybody who’s anybody has been in these Potter films. It must have been a crazy and fantastic ten years or so.

We were very fortunate to work with some of the best that Britain has to offer. And not only was it great to watch them, a lot of those guys were very keen to help us [learn on the job]; fill us in on what to do, how to prepare for a scene and all that kind of stuff. If you’re going to get training that’s the kind of people to get it off of!

And when you got hold of the final book, tell me what happened here. Presumably you got hold of the book and read it, and towards the end you realized that one, Fred Weasley dies heroically at the Battle of Hogwarts, and put the book down and thought, ‘Hold on a minute, that’s me!’

Yeah! I was on the bullet train in Japan, and the English version was out there, and I was reading it on the train. And as I read what happened to my character, that was actually when the ticket inspector came around and started asking for tickets, but he couldn’t speak English and I can’t speak very good Japanese, so I was trying to tell him, ‘I just died here, can you give me a minute?’ So it was one of those surreal situations. It was quite odd reading it.

I suppose if you’re going to die, you might as well die in the last book, the last film.

Exactly! Better than the first one.

Be sure and check out the full video to hear what else James has to say about his golf game and life after Harry Potter!

Jessica J.

I've been making magic at MuggleNet since 2012, when I first joined the staff as a News intern. I've never wavered from the declaration in my childhood journal, circa October 2000: "I LOVE Harry Potter! If I clean my room, my mom says she'll make me a dinner a wizard would love!" Proud Gryffindor; don't hate.