10 years on from his death in 2016, Alan Rickman’s personal diaries revealed his true feelings about his time spent on Harry Potter, as he admits to wanting to leave the franchise
Many remember Alan Rickman for his legendary role as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films, in which his legacy lives on – except he had his own gripes about being a part of it all.
After the passing of the 69-year-old actor in 2016, his wife, Rima Horton, helped in sharing his personal diaries, which formed a book – Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries. Within these pages, the actor shared his unfiltered thoughts and feelings about life on set, which may come as a surprise to some fans.
Before the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, he put pen to paper to say that he was feeling “a bit nothing about HP, which really disturbs me,” and these feelings of discomfort never seemed to go away. He wasn’t a huge fan of the results, it seemed, coming out of the cinema for movie one, and had specific remarks about the music.
He wrote that it “acquires a scale and depth that matches the hideous score by John Williams”. Although the actor, it seemed, was a big fan of the after party later on at the Savoy, according to his musings. After the second film in 2002, he seemed to be already over it, writing, “reiterating no more HP. They don’t want to hear it,” but had later on said he was willing to “see it through”. It wasn’t all bad; in fact, Rickman had a lot of positive things to say about The Prisoner of Azkaban.
He shared in his private journals that the award-winning director did “an extraordinary job”, and he felt the film was much more “grown up”. He went on to praise it, writing that it was “so full of daring that it made me smile and smile,” adding that “every frame of it is the work of an artist and storyteller.”
In the early days of the project, JK Rowling gave Rickman a small nugget of information about his character’s future before it had even been written, but it wasn’t done without nerves. The actor described a moment in which the writer helped him by telling him, “Snape loved Lily,” and this, in his own words, gave him a “cliff edge to hang on”.
His criticisms didn’t quite stop there; in fact, he wrote after seeing The Half-Blood Prince that he wanted to “bang the three Davids’ heads against the nearest wall”, meaning the Harry Potter producers – David Heyman, David Barron and David Yates. While he praised the special effects as “dazzling~” and the character development, he was left asking, “Where is the story?”
By the end of the iconic film series, when it came down to his character Professor Snape’s legendary death, he was not too pleased with how it was planned out. His diary states that Snape’s death on screen played out to be “all a bit epic and Japanese.” Not only that, but he dubbed it as “unsettling to watch”. While he was disappointed with it, he did note that audiences, however, were “very happy”.
Source: Mirror
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