I became Draco Malfoy because my mum had a piece of glass in her foot.
Let me explain.
I was no child prodigy. Sure, I learned from my older brother Jink that it was okay to be interested in creative pursuits of all kinds. Sure, my mum was always supportive of whatever grabbed my fancy at any given moment. But I was born enthusiastic rather than talented.
This is not false modesty. I did have some ability as a singer. All four Felton brothers sang in the church choir at St. Nick’s in Bookham (although in the interest of full disclosure I should state that Chris was kicked out for pinching sweets from the tuck shop). And a prestigious choir school invited me to join, angelic little chap that I was, although as soon as they made me the offer I burst into tears because I didn’t want to change school and leave my friends. Mum, characteristically, told me not to worry about it—but she does from time to time like to bring up the fact that I was accepted. That’s mums for you. So the first time I remember being front and centre was not because of my acting. It was singing the solo in “O Little Town of Bethlehem” one Christmas at St. Nick’s.
In addition to my choral exploits, I also went to an after-school drama club at the nearby Fetcham Village Hall. It took place every Wednesday afternoon: fifteen or twenty kids between the ages of six and ten, all chaotically putting on a play every three months for the mums and dads. Nothing serious, just little ones having fun. And it’s worth repeating: I was nothing to write home about. I definitely wanted to go to the drama club, but my overriding memory of the performances is of embarrassment rather than glory. For one production—it might have been A Christmas Carol—I was given the artistically fulfilling and technically arduous role of “Snowman Number Three.” My mum and granny went to great lengths to make me a snowman outfit, which comprised two wired dresses—one for my body, one for my head. It was an absolute nightmare to put on, and I still remember the ignominy of standing in the wings and peering out through a gap in the curtain to see three or four boys sniggering at the sight of little Tom Felton standing there butt naked, arms in the air, as they dressed me up in my snowman regalia. I’ve grown used to being frequently photographed, but I’m thankful that no photographic evidence exists of that particular moment.
On another occasion we staged Bugsy Malone. Off the back of my Oscar-worthy snowman performance I was promoted to “Tree Number One.” The principal roles were given to the older children who crucially had the ability to speak coherently. I was one of the younger ones trusted with only a single line, rigorously committed to memory, assiduously rehearsed. I stood in line on the makeshift stage, patiently waiting for my cue.
And waiting.
Rehearsing my line in my head.
Preparing myself for my moment of glory.
And then, suddenly, I became aware of an excruciating silence. Everybody was looking expectantly at me. It was my moment and my mind was blank. And so I did what any self-respecting young actor would do: I burst into tears and waddled off the stage as fast as my branches would allow. After the show I ran to my mum, full of tears and apologies. I’m so sorry, Mum. I’m so sorry! My mum comforted me, told me it didn’t matter, that it hadn’t made the slightest difference to the story. But to this day I can still feel the shame. I’d let the team down!
In short, my acting career did not have the most auspicious start. I enjoyed it well enough, but I didn’t excel. Then I started to get more homework, and my short-lived passion for learning the violin kicked in. I told Mum I didn’t think I had time for the drama club any more, and that was that.
Except, that wasn’t that.
The lady who ran the club was a very passionate, dramatic lady called Anne. When my mum told her that I was going to quit the drama club, her response was characteristically flamboyant: “No, no, no! This child belongs in the arts! You must promise me that you’ll take him to London to get an agent. He has raw talent! It would be a terrible waste if he does nothing with it!”
I’m absolutely certain she said this to lots of kids who left her club. I’d shown no special talent on those Wednesdays after school. Quite the opposite. This was surely just the melodramatic pronouncement of a theatrical lady. But she was persistent and her words planted a seed in my mind. Maybe I could get myself an acting agent. That would be pretty cool, no? Maybe the world of acting held more for me than the roles of Snowman Three and Tree One. I started to pester my mum to do just what Anne had suggested: to take me up to London to audition for an acting agency.
Mum was a busy lady, what with all those extra jobs she worked to keep us kids supplied with basketballs, fishing reels and violins. Ordinarily, she would never have been able to juggle all that and have time to take me on the train up to town to satisfy a whim like this, but that’s where the piece of glass came in. It had been embedded in her foot for ages, but like most mums she just got on with life, putting her own needs second. The time came, however, that she had to have it dealt with. The shard was removed and she was on crutches for a few days. Significantly for me, it meant her having a week off work. So, with my pestering ringing in one ear and Anne’s persuasiveness ringing in the other, she suggested that we make the trip to London.
We took the train from Leatherhead, Mum with her trusty A to Z in one hand and a crutch in the other. Our destination was the Abacus Agency, a tiny office up three flights of stairs somewhere in the middle of London. I felt pretty plucky as I said hello, introduced myself and took a seat. I had three big brothers, remember. It teaches you how to talk to people older than yourself. The process of auditioning, or so it seemed to me at the time, was simply to ensure that you weren’t a complete spanner, or cripplingly camera shy. They gave me some paragraphs to read from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and verified that far from being shy of the camera, all I wanted to do was fiddle with it and learn how it worked. They took a photograph of me to put into Spotlight, a kind of actors’ catalogue, and packed me off home. I did nothing more than I imagine scores of kids did every week, but I must have done something right because a couple of weeks later the phone rang. It was the Abacus Agency offering me the opportunity to shoot a commercial in America.
You always remember the phone calls—the tingle of excitement when you hear that you’ve got the job. That first time was no exception. I was barely seven years old and they were giving me the chance to go to America, which none of us Felton boys had ever done. Not only was I heading on a two-week trip to the States, I was heading on a two-week trip to all the best bits of the States. The job was for an insurance company called Commercial Union, and the theme of the advert was “invest with us and when you’re an old man you can take your grandson on the road trip of a lifetime.” They needed to hire a cute kid to be the grandson, to stand in the right place holding his grandfather’s hand at all the coolest locations in America, absolutely no talent required. Enter Tom.
My mum accompanied me, of course. We travelled to Los Angeles, Arizona, Las Vegas, Miami and New York. They put us up in hotels, quite a novelty for us. Mum was always particularly pleased if we stayed somewhere with a pool table, because that kept me quiet for hours, and I was transfixed by a thing of beauty called the Cartoon Network—another novelty—which meant I could watch cartoons all day long. I also discovered for the first time that certain hotels had a special system: you pick up the phone, call someone downstairs and they’ll bring you food! In my case: French fries! I remember my mum timidly calling the producers and asking if it was okay to order me some fries and put it on the hotel bill. I imagine she was a refreshing change from the child-star tiger mums they were used to dealing with. We had no outrageous requests. I was perfectly happy sitting in my room watching Johnny Bravo with a plate of chips.
Our first day of filming took place in Times Square, perhaps Manhattan’s busiest tourist trap and a big old leap from leafy Surrey and the Fetcham Village Hall. Barriers separated the film crew from the crowds and the traffic. There were people to do my hair, make-up and costume. I stood there wearing the beanie hat and big red puffa jacket that comprised my outfit and gradually became aware of people waving and cheering. I turned to look at them and realised that they were cheering at me! I grinned and waved back enthusiastically and they cheered some more. This was pretty fun. I was famous already! Brilliant! Except of course, I wasn’t famous. I was entirely unknown. Turns out that with my angelic little face, my beanie and my puffa jacket they thought I was Macaulay Culkin in full Home Alone garb, or maybe his little brother. Sorry, Macaulay, for stealing your fans, even if it was just for one day.
I didn’t mind. This was exciting and new and I had a taste for it. And there was something prescient about being mistaken for Macaulay Culkin, who was cast in Home Alone by the director Chris Columbus, because it was Chris who would go on to cast me as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films.
I was paid the princely sum of £200 for that first advert, but I was too young to have much sense of what that meant. I was still happy with my twenty pence at the Dorking car boot sale, don’t forget, and I was far more excited by the shiny red puffa jacket that they let me keep. I loved that puffa jacket. I was buzzing from the experience, though, and keen to tell everybody all about it. I used to go to a kids’ club at Leatherhead Leisure Centre called Crazy Tots and I couldn’t wait to share my adventures with my friends there. I didn’t try to tell them about the Golden Gate Bridge or Caesars Palace or Times Square. I wanted to tell them about the important stuff: the room service, the Cartoon Network and, yes, the red puffa jacket. Pretty quickly, however, a hard truth presented itself.
Literally.
Nobody.
Cared.
I suppose the world I was trying to describe was so detached from Crazy Tots at the leisure centre that it was impossible for my friends to understand what I was on about. I soon learned to keep my trap shut.
I carried on auditioning. Auditions as an adult can be a pretty brutal experience, and believe me I’ve had my share. The bad ones aren’t those when you walk into the audition room and can’t stop farting (yes, it’s happened). The bad ones are those when you realise that the person making the decision hasn’t looked you in the eye from the moment you entered. The bad ones are those when there’s a dancing bit in the middle that you know you can’t do, and they know you can’t do, and it’s all going to be mortifying for everybody involved. As a kid, though, I rather took auditions in my stride, even the awful ones. I remember a particularly embarrassing casting call for a spaghetti commercial when I had to pretend to be an Italian kid and eata-a-bowla-pasta, cry “mamma mia” and sing a little song. I didn’t even like pasta at the time and I’ve no doubt that I looked daft as a doorknob. It didn’t put me off. Mum managed to make our audition trips to London something of a treat. I’d do my bit, then we’d go to Hamleys, the toy shop on Regent Street, where I was allowed to play on the arcade machines in the basement while Mum had a cup of tea. And, of course, we both knew what might lie in store if I was successful. Another trip somewhere cool, another opportunity to binge-watch cartoons and order room service, and a £200 cheque at the end of it? Duh! Yes please!
It’s always been the strange auditions that have got me the parts. That was certainly the case for my next job: a commercial for Barclaycard. It was a particularly exciting prospect for me because the face of Barclaycard at the time was my absolute favourite actor, the one I watched most as a youngster and who I completely fell in love with: Rowan Atkinson. Some of our happiest times as a family were when we sat all together in front of the TV watching Mr. Bean. My dad would be pissing himself with laughter. My mum would try very hard not to snigger, usually unsuccessfully. We four boys would literally be in tears. So the opportunity to meet my hero—let alone appear alongside him—was incredibly exciting.
They were auditioning in pairs, so I found myself alongside a young girl in front of three or four casting executives. The girl had huge hair and was wearing a very colourful dress. “There’s no script,” they told us. “When we say so, we want you both to mime as if you’ve just heard the doorbell and you’re opening up the door and Mr. Bean is standing there. You think you can do that?”
I nodded. I’d been through quite a few auditions by this time so I wasn’t too nervous. The girl, though, seemed kind of kooky. She turned to the casting people and said: “Are we allowed to faint?”
There was a moment. The casting people exchanged a look. I found myself thinking: wow, she’s really going for it. Maybe I need to up my game.
“I think we’d rather you didn’t faint,” one of them said.
She looked a bit crestfallen, but she nodded and the scene started. We both mimed opening up the door and then, before I could react at all and at the very top of her voice, the kooky girl inexplicably screamed: “MOTHER GOOSE!” And she hit the floor like a toppled tree.
Silence. The casting people studiously avoided catching each other’s eye. Obviously they couldn’t laugh. I completely forgot I was supposed to be reacting to Mr. Bean and just stared at the girl in astonishment. It was that reaction, I think, that got me the part, and I learned something from the experience: don’t go into an audition with too much pre-planned. It’s never about learning lines or whether you can cry on demand. It’s about what’s next, not what’s now. Just react to what’s around you. That girl, I think, had decided long before she entered the audition room that she was going to hit the deck, and it did her no favours.
Sadly for me, Rowan Atkinson pulled out of the Barclaycard campaign before shooting started, so I never did get to act with him. Mum and I had a pleasant enough jaunt around France filming the commercial, but I won’t lie, it would have been a lot more fun if we’d had Mr. Bean as a co-worker. I did get to go skiing, though. Sort of. One scene had me standing in skis at the top of a nursery slope. It was the first time I’d ever been in the mountains or seen that amount of snow. I was desperate to give skiing a go, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t to move a muscle. The last thing they wanted was a young actor with his leg in traction. Insurance wouldn’t cover it. I did as I was told but the time would come, a few years down the line, when I would be somewhat less obedient when it came to observing the rules and regulations of a film set…