Ginny Weasley was a prominent supporting character in the Harry Potter novels, but the big screen adaptations didn’t exactly do justice to the character. While appearing on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast (via Entertainment Weekly), Bonnie Wright expressed disappointment at how her character was handled in the movies.
“I definitely feel there was anxiety toward performing and doing the best thing as my character built,” Wright 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.“
Bonnie Wright made her first appearance as Ginny Weasley in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when she was just nine years old. She wasn’t even supposed to have any lines until director Chris Columbus insisted. “The actual first line I had in the film, which was one line, was given to me on the day, [and director Chris Columbus] was like, ‘I think you need a line,’ which is my ‘good luck’ to Harry,” Wright said.
At the time, J.K. Rowling was still in the midst of writing the novels, so Wright wasn’t aware that her character would go on to have a bigger role and end up marrying Harry Potter. As far as raising concerns about her character, Wright explained that “there was no room for much change in those 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 later realizing that I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do that. So it wasn’t really my fault, exactly.“
While the Harry Potter movies may not have had the foresight to develop Ginny Weasley properly, perhaps the Harry Potter TV series will be able to flesh out the character. The plan is for each season of the series to focus on one novel, which will leave plenty of screen time for all involved, even Ginny.