Evanna Lynch Discusses Awkwardly Transitioning from Fangirl to Celebrity in “Normal Not Normal” Podcast

We all know that Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood) is a true Harry Potter nerd just like the rest of us. This is why it is so enjoyable to hear her discussing the magical experience of the Harry Potter films. In the first part of her interview for James and Oliver Phelps’s (the Weasley twins) podcast Normal Not Normal, Lynch chats with her costars about her obsession leading up to her audition, her being cast, and the awkwardness of first being on set with people she used to have posters of in her bedroom.

Like so many in the fandom, MuggleNet was a big part of her Harry Potter experience. Lynch described how it felt weird to keep her casting a secret from the rest of the community.

I was definitely a big part of the community, and that’s what was so weird when I got the part. I was like, ‘I know all the secrets!’ I kind of felt like a traitor to my community that I couldn’t tell them what was going on. Yeah, everything I was really involved in. And I had all these opinions about who they would cast, yeah, just how they would do things. I was definitely the annoying fan who was like, ‘So why did you cut this scene out?’

Lynch had the superfan status from the very beginning, wearing her classic radish earrings to the audition, which she had made for a Halloween costume the year before. Lynch described the time between her first audition to when she got the part of Luna as very fast, less than two weeks.

Got a phone call, first from Fiona [Weir, the casting director]. And then David Yates called me, and I knew his name, of course, because I’d been stalking him, and he was like, ‘Dan is going to be in the audition.’ And my obsession with Dan was on another level.

Lynch went to bed that night after the phone call with posters of the golden trio all around her room. James Phelps asked if Lynch looked at those photos and said, “We’re going to be friends?”

Yes, I was convinced! I wasn’t wrong. I mean, Dan is so lovely, but we never got close because I think he was like, ‘I’m going to keep you here.’ And he was dead right to do that. But yeah. Reading the books, I was like, ‘These are my people.’ And I finally got there, but the hard thing was that when I finally got there, I didn’t know how to talk to them. Because my whole life, I was just obsessed. I’d ask Dan a question, [and] I knew his cats’ names; I knew his parents’ names. So I just keep meeting people and I would be like, ‘I know who you are,’ and I didn’t know how to tone it down. I didn’t really know how to socialize with you all.

Though Lynch worked hard to make her place in the Harry Potter films, her lack of confidence made her feel inferior to everyone else at first. Playing the part of Luna was easy, she says, but outside of shooting, she didn’t know how to be a celebrity. She describes when she started to feel the celebrity attention at camp the same summer the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix film was released.

Before, I was just so used to being the odd one. You’d find your other odd people in the crowd and they’d be your friends. And at this summer camp, everyone was really interested in me and nice to me. I suddenly found, ‘Whoa, I’ve got too many friends.’ That was a bit like a high at first, when you are not a popular kid and suddenly you are. I think I overdid it a bit. I was so naïve. There were just a lot of people who were not real friends.

You can find the first part of Evanna Lynch’s Normal Not Normal interview on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.