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UNDESIRABLE NO. 1 (PART 3)

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THE WORLD’S BEST/WORST CHAPERONE

If you’re a child on set, you need a chaperone. It’s the law. And it makes sense. It’s not easy to keep track of who’s doing what when you have hundreds of children marauding all over the place. A chaperone is there to make certain you’re safe, and to ensure that you’re sticking to the many regulations that dictate what a child actor can and can’t do during a day’s filming, chief of which is timekeeping. They must ensure that you’re never on set for more than three hours at a time and that your daily quota of tutoring is observed. Then they must check that you’re eating properly, and that you’re keeping out of trouble. Some of the rules seemed ridiculous at the time. They’re even supposed to accompany you to the toilet, so they always knew if and when I was answering a call of nature.

Some of us—including Emma and Rupert—had professional chaperones. It was their job, and they were rigorous about ticking all the boxes that needed to be ticked and jumping through all the hoops that needed to be jumped through. Some kids had family members. Daniel, for example, had his dad Alan as a chaperone. I had my grandfather keeping a benevolent eye on me (as well as teaching me how to sneer), and I had my mum, who was used to accompanying me on film sets in any case.

And then, when nobody else could do it on Prisoner of Azkaban, when desperation kicked in, I had my brother Chris. He was, from a kid’s point of view, the best chaperone I could have asked for. He was also, from an objective point of view, quite comfortably the worst chaperone in the history of filmmaking.

I’ve already told you about our habit of spending all night fishing before heading back to set and pretending that I was refreshed and ready after a solid eight-hour sleep. Chris taught me more during those all-night sessions than how to land a carp. He also taught the fourteen-year-old Tom how to roll a joint. Predictably enough, I soon graduated from preparing the joints to partaking of them. As I may have mentioned, having three older brothers meant that I progressed to certain activities earlier than some.

By the time Chris was my chaperone I’d moved from a dressing room to a trailer—a personal caravan in the parking lot, just outside Door 5. While I headed off to hair and make-up, he would eat his fill from the canteen and conk out in the trailer for the rest of the day. On those occasions, I’d never see him. I’d return to the trailer after a hard day’s filming and Chris would be stretching and yawning and just beginning to think about getting up. He’d neck a cup of tea, chuff a few cigarettes, then we’d wrap up warm, head back to the lake and do the whole thing all over again.

A professional, fastidious, conscientious chaperone would literally be standing to one side with a stopwatch, ensuring that their charge’s time on set had not overrun, or that their education was not suffering from a lack of time in the tutoring rooms. A professional, fastidious, conscientious chaperone would hurry their charge from set to lessons as quickly as possible. Not Chris. On the occasions when he was not having a kip in the trailer, we would saunter together from set to tutoring, taking the most indirect route across the studios, maybe stopping in at the kitchens for a can of Coke and a bar of chocolate (“Fill yer boots, mate, drink as much of that shit as you like!”) and taking a few minutes for at least one “breath of fresh air” behind the Great Hall.

The chaperone is the master, or mistress, of the per diem. This is a cash payment given to each actor, chaperone and crew member once a week to cover daily living expenses while we were away on location. Per diems amounted to about thirty pounds a day, and they were meant to be administered by the chaperone and spent on outgoings such as food, laundry and phoning home. Naturally, it would be madness to give the cash directly to the kids. Wouldn’t it?

Chris didn’t think so. Being the cool older brother, he was happy to hand over the dosh straight up. Sure, he wasn’t above threatening to withhold the readies as a power card—“Do as I say or I’ll take your per diems away, maggot!”—but in general the cash went straight into my back pocket. And given that I could manage a whole day on a Peperami and a bag of McCoys, and that my desire to blow crisp twenty-pound notes on something as mundane as clean laundry was limited, my per diems went quite a long way on new skateboard wheels and the latest computer games. (Chris’s per diems were also deployed in a way the filmmakers certainly didn’t expect or intend: it was his weed money, and it enabled him to continue being a regular Harry Pot-head.)

Chris was also not beyond “acquiring” the occasional memento from the set. I’m not saying it was entirely because of him that, on the final three films, they put in place spontaneous car checks for anybody leaving the studios. I’m not saying that they had to hire a whole security force on the back of some of his light-fingered shenanigans. There were plenty of regulars at Leavesden who would help themselves to a handful of Galleons or the occasional Hogwarts tie, but as far as offenders went, Chris was the Don. Certainly, several dummy copies of Gilderoy Lockhart’s Magical Me miraculously apparated inside his bag. But he was not, I hasten to add, quite the cold-hearted criminal I’m making him out to be. The few things he took were eventually auctioned off, either for a local charity or for causes close to him. On one occasion he was offered a substantial sum of money to take secret pictures of the set so that they could be leaked before the next film was released. He declined, of course (at least he told me he did).

So, the worst chaperone but also the best. He treated me like an adult when I was still just a spotty teen. And he was definitely one of the most popular guys on set. Everyone liked Chris, and I think the experience was good for him. When he started on the films he was quite reserved and perhaps even looked a little aggressive, with his shaved head and two gold hooped earrings. Everyone on set welcomed him with open arms and that softened him up a little. He’d always been a bit brittle and dismissive about acting as a pursuit—unlike Jink, of course—but time with the Potter family helped, dare I say it, to bring out his more sensitive side. Bless his cotton socks.

As well as hardcore gangster rap and carp fishing, Chris and I were in love with cars of all shapes and sizes. We used to scan the pages of Auto Trader and salivate over potential acquisitions. We were obsessed with BMWs, black ones especially. No matter that I was far too young to drive at the time—Chris had his licence and I inherited his petrol-head nature, just as I had so many of his other enthusiasms. So when a black BMW 328i came up for sale nearby, and it turned out I had just enough cash in my bank account to buy it for my brother, there was no question in my mind that it would be a good way to deploy my earnings. We took a taxi to this guy’s house and handed over a Tesco carrier bag full of used notes. Needless to say, he was a little suspicious. We sat there for ages, watching him count out the cash, holding each note up to the light while we forced ourselves to appear calm, as if we did this kind of thing every day. Once the guy was satisfied with his dosh, Chris took the keys and got behind the wheel with me at his side. With great restraint, he drove it slowly about 200 yards down the road and round the corner, out of sight of the previous owner. He stopped the vehicle. Engaged the handbrake. He turned to look at me. His face was hard to read. Then he grabbed my head in his two hands, kissed my forehead and let out a shriek of unbridled pleasure. I swear there was a tear in his eye. “Thank you!” he said repeatedly. “Thank you soooo much!” We both whooped triumphantly, as though we’d pulled off some great and elaborate heist. I was years away from being able to get behind the wheel of a car, but I was as obsessed with that BMW as Chris was. The wheels. The thunder of the engine revving. The face-melting acceleration. In most ways I was no different to a regular teenager with the obligatory Ferrari poster on his wall. The only difference was that in this case I had the means to turn mine and Chris’s dream into a reality.

You may have twigged by now that the influence of the world’s best/worst chaperone occasionally led me to express my more rebellious side. Chris introduced me to marijuana, the forbidden fruit, and it was of course referenced in every rap song I’d ever listened to. So it perhaps wasn’t a total surprise that I should take his introduction to the Devil’s lettuce and run with it. It led to perhaps my stupidest ever moment as a youngster.

The scene was a scraggly field behind the village hall in Bookham, Surrey, very near to where I lived with my mum. This was after my parents had divorced and I was going through a typical adolescent phase. Four of us were sitting in a circle on the grass. I was wearing my prized red Wu-Tang hoodie and we were passing round a joint. Joint-rolling paraphernalia was littered all around us: tobacco, rolling papers, a lighter, an eighth of hash. And the unmistakable, musty smell of weed hung over our little group.

It was as the joint was in my hand that I looked up and saw, less than a hundred metres away, two police officers, a man and a woman. They were walking in our direction with a certain purpose in their stride.

Shit.

One of my brothers—I shan’t reveal which one—had given me a piece of advice for occasions such as this. “Bruv, just remember: if it’s not on you, they can’t do you for it.” They had to prove, according to my legal counsel, that you were actually guilty of possessing the goods. If you didn’t have the hash in your pocket, he told me, you were perfectly safe. With that advice ringing in my ears and the police less than fifty metres away, I stood up, resplendent in my bright red hoodie, gathered the paraphernalia in my arms and tried to force it, along with the joint, into a nearby hedge. I did this in plain view of the police officers as they continued their approach, before returning to my friends and sitting down again.

The police arrived. They looked down at us. We looked up at them with innocent eyes. The stench of wacky baccy made it absolutely obvious what we’d been doing.

They made me return to the hedge and recover the goods, which included the half-smoked, still-smouldering spliff. Predictably enough, I was arrested for about a fiver’s worth of hash. It was hardly the crime of the century. The police officers weren’t exactly smashing a major international drug ring. Any other time, I think they’d have given us a rap on the knuckles and sent us home. But the policewoman was a trainee, and the policeman was showing her how to do things by the book. And so I was bundled into the back of a police van and the doors clanged behind me.

I was bang to rights. But the consequences of this latest brush with the law could have been much worse. I’m sure Warner Brothers had a certain amount of sway when it came to suppressing stories about their cast members being caught in compromising positions. But Draco arrested for being a pothead would have been a hard one to spike. As I sat in the van, though, I wasn’t remotely worried about that. I wasn’t remotely worried about anything because I was high as a kite. Then it hit me. Just as when I was collared in HMV, there was one thing that could make this sorry episode a whole lot worse. Please, I thought to myself, please don’t call my mum.

They called my mum.

There’s nothing worse than seeing the look of disappointment in your mum’s eyes, especially when they’re full of tears. We sat at a table in a little interview room at the police station. A uniformed officer came in, gave me a full-on Line of Duty interrogation, then proceeded to give me the bollocking of my life. I’m pretty sure they were just trying to scare me away from doing it again, but of course, once I’d sobered up to the humiliation of Mum’s disappointment, I had to wonder: did they recognise me? If so, they were professional enough not to mention it. If not, I was glad, not for the first time, that I didn’t have the same kind of profile as Daniel, Emma and Rupert. I was sent back home, tail tucked once again, feeling stupid. Happily, Warner Brothers never found out about my escapade (or at least they never told me they did). My days as Draco were not over.