Harry Potter star Chris Rankin revealed he has remained good friends with Irish actress Evanna Lynch years on since they made their screen debut.
However, opening up about how his life has changed since finding fame on the film franchise, he admitted there’s some stars he hasn’t spoken to since the cameras stopped rolling.
Asked if he has remained friendly with any of his on-screen Weasley brothers, including megastar Domhnall Gleeson, Chris told the Irish Mirror: “It’s a good question, do we all keep in touch?
“I always say it’s a bit like when you leave school and there’s people who you keep in touch with regularly, go for dinner with, doing comic cons and circuits like that.
“There are quite a few of us that still see each other, under normal circumstances on a regular basis.
“Equally, there are people who, through no malice, you don’t have much in common with and for no particular reason, just drift away from. It’s just life.
“There are some I see a lot more of and some I haven’t seen in donkey’s years but not because we don’t like each other, it’s just circumstances.”
The theatre star, who played Percy Weasley in the Harry Potter franchise, went on to explain: “Weirdly, I’m [close with] Stanislav Yanevski who plays Victor Krum in the fourth film, although I didn’t work with him in the films because he was in the one I wasn’t in.
“We do a lot of work together now and Sean Biggerstaff who played Oliver Wood, I see quite a lot of him.
“Evanna Lynch I see occasionally because she has been in America so I haven’t got to see as much of her recently as I have in the past.
“I’ve been over to Ireland a couple of times and obviously I have seen people while I was there.”
It’s been almost two decades since the baby-faced stars made their screen debuts - Chris in Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone, Evanna later in Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix.
And while some fled to Hollywood and beyond, Chris – who is based in the UK, revealed he has remained a central member of the Harry Potter fandom community – travelling to comic cons and jobs globally since then.
More than happy to keep the magic of the movies alive in his life, the 36-year-old said: “I was incredibly fortunate to get cast in Harry Potter.
“The short story is, I wrote a letter saying I’d be a good Percy Weasley, they agreed and I got the part. So I am eternally grateful, it kick-started my career.”
And after months out of work due to Covid, the actor has been announced as one of the main stars of the first live pantomime premiering in the UK this Christmas.
He will play the Fairy Godfather in a new production of Cinderella. The show allows the audience to take control by pressing buttons that trigger sounds live in the studio, and interact as if they were in the theatre itself.
