Bonnie Wright Blames ‘Harry Potter’ Scripts for Her Lackluster Ginny Performance

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 30, 2023 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 30, 2023 |

The actress who played Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter movies, Bonnie Wright, admitted to being disappointed by her character’s lack of screen time, while in conversation with Michael Rosenbaum for the Inside of You podcast.

“I definitely feel there was anxiety toward performing and doing the best thing as my character built,” she said.

“Like, ‘Oh gosh, will I do justice to this character that people love?’ So that was always hard to do, especially when, inevitably, a lot of the scenes of every character were chopped down from the book to the film. 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 has received criticism for years for her…*ahem*…acting. The Ginny of the books was vivacious and interesting, but Wright’s Ginny was, let’s just say, bland. But she blames the scripts. “There were a million executives going through them all. I think what I maybe took, which I don’t take so much to heart now, is I kind of felt that maybe my anxiety was about, ‘Oh, I’m going to be seen as badly portraying this character,’ rather than realizing that I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do that. So it wasn’t my fault, exactly.”

Okay, fine, Ginny didn’t have a lot of scenes, or lines. But she got to play a slightly larger role in the later films, and still, Wright’s performance left a lot to be desired. At the end of the day, you have to wonder: Is it the line or is it the line read?

“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,” she said.

Sure, I wish there was more Ginny. But I also wish the Ginny we got was a little more. Other actors like Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom) and Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood) managed to achieve nuance and personality in their portrayals of secondary characters, so, maybe the scripts weren’t the problem.