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For more than half Rupert Grint’s 23 years, he has had another existence as Ron Weasley, Harry Potter’s comedy sidekick. As the final film in the series is released, where to now for the number-two boy wizard? Rupert Grint describes it as like watching a row of dominoes falling towards you, and when we emerge from a cellar bar in central London, climbing up to street-level Soho, it’s clear he’s caught it just right. A few strides in the direction of his hotel and a face among a group of outdoor lunchers flinches in recognition, prompting other heads to turn and look. Quickly a chipper twentysomething is bounding across the road, dodging motorbikes, his cameraphone outstretched as if it’s something Grint has mislaid. “Would you mind, Rupert, if we?” I’m sure this happens to other people with famous faces, but does it happen to quite such a degree? Grint’s co-star in the Harry Potter film franchise – the boy wizard himself, Daniel Radcliffe – is widely agreed to have the most recognisable face in the world, and is accordingly pitied for it. But Grint appears on all the bus-stop posters too. Grint has also been acting in this seemingly endless series of films, adapted from JK Rowling’s books, since 2000. The 23-year-old’s face has been reproduced a billion times on all the lampshades and Lego boxes and stationery sets and “edible cake toppers”. Radcliffe gets harassed wherever he goes but he gets to be Harry, the hero with a tragic backstory and a dozen glamour moments per film. It has been Grint’s lot to play the abiding best mate, Ron Weasley – on screen about as often as Harry but mainly there to chatter his teeth (cowardly foil to his friend’s breezy grit), or say “bloody hell” (Ron’s the defeatist, working-class one), or get injured, because nary does a film complete without Grint requiring medical treatment. He’s the comedy sidekick who, by my count, waited 400 minutes, well into the third film, before he got his first properly funny line. And still he has to deal with the domino-topple of faces everywhere he goes, the suicide dashes for photos. “I wouldn’t normally ask,” says the twentysomething in Soho, and soon he’s got Grint in a tight clutch, posing with a finger pointed to say, “Look what I found!” Grint used to quite like going to music festivals, but people there started finding him in the crowd and wordlessly hoisting him up for display. Picture requests are nothing, a breeze, compared to being presented like a weighty fishing catch at a festival, and when we round a corner and Grint is asked to pause for another picture he’s already extending an arm and readying a photo smile before the request is out. We’ve walked less than 100 metres. How does this guy get anywhere? He must have to add half-again to every planned journey, put aside long weekends to get around the supermarket. “I wouldn’t normally ask,” says the second fan just like the first, and there’s probably something revealing here. Grint is loose limbed, almost groggy on this June afternoon. There’s an easy roll to his 5ft 11in, a nonchalance I’ve come to know well during my hour or so with him, and his eyes under a hanging fringe are a quarter shut. He looks approachable. Actually he looks muggable, and you’d worry about him getting fleeced all the time if he didn’t habitually, daydreamingly, leave his wallet and keys at home. Once he got all the way to Paris before noticing he’d not brought a suitcase, and had to go out and buy himself emergency clothes. That hanging fringe might be some effort towards anonymity. It’s long enough that with careful brushing he could cover the upper half of his face if he wanted, and that might become necessary when the latest and last Harry Potter film, somewhat clunkily titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two , comes out in cinemas this month. Images of Grint, as well as those of co-stars Radcliffe and Emma Watson, are already plastered on nearby bus-stops in anticipation. “You can spot it from 50 feet away,” he tells me in the Soho cellar bar, “someone recognising you. And then you watch it build. I do miss it, sometimes, the invisibility. Being able to get round Tesco. Not meet anyone who wants to take a picture with you. It’s manageable but it’s just, like, constant.” At least neither picture-taker calls him Ron. That happens, he says, quite a lot. “I answer to it. I turn around to it in the street.” That’s not going to stop people doing it, I tell him, as he slowly swings a leg on to the couch and folds it underneath himself, to sit cross legged. “I know! I can’t help it.” He stifles a yawn. Daniel Radcliffe has said that is is “very, very hard to hate Rupert Grint” but he has also pointed out that you could set the man on fire and he wouldn’t definitely flinch. “Any slower and he’d be in reverse,” his close friend James Phelps, who plays Grint’s onscreen brother Fred in the films, tells me. “Nothing fazes him,” says Matt Lewis, a fellow wizard called Neville in the franchise. “Rupert wears his fame lightly,” Potter producer David Heyman explains, “and is very laid-back. It’s not like I’d say he’s warm, exactly. He’s just a good, decent person. Not unctuous. Not obsequious.” And not a big one for confessions. “He isn’t the type to call you up with a problem, no,” says Phelps. Grint is sweet and personable, happy to put up with oft-asked questions about a franchise that has taken up more of his life, now, than it has not. He is even civil when I press about money and girls, and transcribing the recording of our chat later on is a breeze – once I work out to get “Yeah, sort of, um” copied and ready to paste. But it occurs to me, somewhere around Grint’s 30th use of this last construction, that it might be serving as a sort of Rowling-esque spell. Yersortovum : to repel the intended devastation of an interviewer’s careful questions. With Grint you have to ask, and ask, and ask the same thing, to shake him from languor and from his reliance on dusty answers that have seen him through interviews for years. Take this. I want to know his impressions of Radcliffe, on first meeting him, aged 11. Grint’s a year older and anyone who can remember life as a pre-teen will remember what an impossible chasm of time and gathered wisdom that seemed. What did he think of the squitty little 10-year-old, cast opposite him? Grint starts talking about how exciting everything was at the time. He applied for the part on a whim… But what did you think, I repeat – perhaps when you first shook hands? Did you size him up? Grint considers. He yeah-sort-of-ums. What was the very first thing that occurred to you? And then, finally, he sniffs up a laugh, tickled by buried memory. “I remember thinking,” says Grint, grinning brilliantly, “that this guy has a really triangular-shaped head.” Imagine being 11 and auditioning for the school play. You get the part – high fives – then that school play is rehearsed, performed, expanded, performed again, again, again, all the while discussed at quite some length, until you are 23 years old . Grint (the eldest boy in a large family, his unusual forename picked by fun-loving parents from a hat) had been in school plays. He had played Rumpel in Rumpelstiltskin and a fish in Noah’s Ark . “…and so had every kid who’d ever done a school play we met.” So said the director of the first two Harry Potter films, Chris Columbus, hardly exaggerating. His search for child actors was so extensive it quickly moved beyond talent agencies and drama schools to include open pleas in the trade press (“…Must be a redhead…”) and a casting call on the children’s news programme Newsround . Grint saw this, one afternoon in 1999, and sent in an application “on a whim. I’d already won a Ron Weasley lookalike competition in a newspaper so I thought I had a chance.” Dad Nigel, a memorabilia dealer, and mum Jo, a housewife, filmed Grint doing a rap about how right he’d be in the role, and they sent in the tape. “Chris Columbus said that to a degree when you cast the kids you cast the parents,” producer Heyman tells me. Columbus had directed the kids’ film Home Alone some years before, starring the child actor Macaulay Culkin. There was an understanding that the ensuing varied traumas of the Culkin family (child-parent divorce proceedings, for instance) must be avoided. “The Grints are incredibly close, and they put a real emphasis on having a good time,” says Heyman. “They’re very chilled, no nonsense.” Grint calls his dad “Nige”, says co-star Lewis, “and has done for as long as I can remember. That’s Rupert’s way.” Grint’s first screen test with Radcliffe and Emma Watson , watched now on YouTube, is telling. He’s the only one of the three who remembers to act when he’s not speaking lines, for a start, and he reaches a glorious peak of dramatic effort when Watson, as girl wizard Hermione, reads from a book about an ancient piece of magic that is supposed to prevent death. Beside her Grint – frowning and baffled, then eyebrows up to consider it properly, then a quick, approving nod – suggests all of man’s complicated feelings towards immortality. I tell Grint is was a tour de force, beyond his years, etc. He laughs and parries. “I’ve also seen footage of Dan and Emma with another potential Ron. He was really good. I’d have picked him.” By the beginning of 2000, Grint, Radcliffe and Watson were in a field in north Yorkshire, shooting early scenes for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone . Radcliffe has recalled an upbeat Grint dreaming up a pretend radio interview to entertain them all between takes. “At that age you’re fearless,” says Grint. “Nothing bothers you.” Witness footage of him at a press conference, convened to unveil the young actors to the world for the first time. Grint says all the right things (“I think I’m scarily like my character”) and cracks jokes (“Speaking as a wizard…”). He owns the room. “It was the first time any of these kids had been exposed to the voracious press,” remembers Heyman, “and they were voracious. Somebody asked him, ‘So, Rupert, how much are you making?’ A really sensitive question to ask a 12-year-old boy.” Unfazed, Grint made a reference to Rowling’s text, quipping that he didn’t understand talk of “Muggle” (non-magical) money. “It wasn’t rehearsed,” says Heyman. “He was just very quick, very droll. He’s quite selfless, Rupert, any jokes he makes are rarely to draw attention to himself. They’re always about deflecting.” When the gang were making the sequel, 2002′s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets , something began to change. You can see the beginnings of it in an American TV interview, recorded shortly after the New York premiere of Philosopher’s Stone . Newscaster Katie Couric, fingers pinched in an asking-the-tough-questions pose, asks Grint: “In your very objective way, I’m sure you won’t be, but tell me what you think of the film.” He looks blank for a moment, and you can almost see the first, formative “yeah-sort-of-um” form on his lips. “There comes an awkward stage when you’re growing up,” he says now, “when you’re just really aware of yourself, and quite self-conscious. And I did kind of pull back a little bit.” Radcliffe responded to the attention by becoming talkative, a deliberate charmer. “Dan over time became more confident, the quick-witted one,” says Heyman. “Rupert would never show off in any way.” When I ask Grint at what age he felt himself begin to withdraw into himself, he answers: “Four, I guess? Three or four.” I scramble through my notes. Four ? He should’ve been at home in Hertfordshire, learning lines for Noah’s Ark… But of course he means the films. Grint dates his age by the films. First shave: four. First time journalists started asking him about girls: five. “You measure your life that way,” he says. “I don’t want it to sound like it wasn’t enjoyable, it was. Just sometimes hard to keep track.” It’s my suspicion – as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) bled into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) bled into Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) bled into Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) – that the stuff also got rather less fun to film for Grint. His character, Ron, takes on an increasingly reactive role, always there in a scene but mostly to puff out his cheek , or shake his head, or raise an eyebrow. “There were a few times when it would get quite boring. And you’d want this or that film to just end.” There’s a scene in Order of the Phoenix when characters in the foreground talk about Ron’s father being “mortally wounded”. In the background Grint puffs out his cheeks, shakes his head, and raises an eyebrow. He wasn’t at the top of his game that day. Yet he has been consistently picked out, by critics and co-stars, as the best actor among the franchise’s young stars. John Hurt, who appeared in the first film, identified him as the “born actor”. Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the third, predicted for him the most storied career. Just last month Tom Felton (the villain Draco Malfoy in every instalment) suggested Grint was the most irreplaceable on set, “a comedic genius”. The final Potter film, everyone tells me, will give the actor a long-awaited chance to stretch himself again. Ron gets grievously wounded, naturally (his arm torn open by a baddie’s spell) but he also rides a broomstick through a burning building, and says take-charge lines like “We can end this!”, and weeps over a dead family member. “He has quite a few emotionally charged scenes,” says Phelps, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if he steals the show.” Lewis says: “Me and Dan have spoken about it and we both agreed, we can see Rupert going on and working the longest out of everyone.” So, Rupert, how much are you making? However crass, it’s difficult not to wonder when the laid-back dude in front of you could unblinkingly buy the bar in which you’re sitting. Scoop up, no doubt, a tidy chunk of the surrounding real estate as well. “It’s something I really, um, get, like, kind of… It doesn’t motivate me. My dad handles all that.” Grint clears his throat and shifts a little straighter in his seat. “I don’t even know how much it is.” The compilers of those icky annual rich lists claim to know, and put it at £28m in total earnings. Grint has a flat in east London and also owns an estate near his parents Hertfordshire home, said to be worth around £5m. “The first thing you see is a mini-lake in his front garden, with a swan-shaped pedalo in the middle of it,” says Lewis. “He’s got a five-a-side football pitch. I think he built a mini ice-rink recently. Rupert’s just one of those people who’ll think of something ridiculous he can buy and go and do it.” Considering a list of his purchases over the years you do get the sense of somebody spending to the loose, incautious end of spontaneous fun. He likes cars, and owns a bright orange Range Rover, a Mini fitted with special Lamborghini doors, a working ice-cream van, and a hovercraft. He went through a unicycle phase, a banjo phase, a Japanese gadget phase, and once bought a coin-operated fairground fortune-telling machine. In recent months he splashed on two miniature donkeys. To go with his miniature pigs. “I do, kind of, spend a lot,” Grint says. “And just on stupid things. Because I don’t really know what to do. What are you supposed to do? Um. It just seems like way too much. We don’t deserve it, at all, for what we do.” I’m not sure this is completely true. He deserves a few mil, surely, to offset the years and years of questions about his on-screen relationship with Emma Watson. Briefly, in plot terms, it’s clear from the off that Ron and Hermione share a frisson; but it takes seven long films for them to grow up, get it together, and kiss. A gestation, I suggest to Grint, that must have felt like some kind of medieval betrothal – nervously eyeing each other up, knowing romance would eventually be expected. He chuckles politely but quickly looks a lot sleepier at the mention of the subject. Nothing comes up more often in conversation, he says, also stating with pleasing honesty and not a little understatement: “It can be hard to keep up the energy.” Of the long-awaited kiss – it finally happens in the new film – Grint says, “Such a small, small moment. Yeah, that’s going to be a bit of an anticlimax.” And just like that, a decade of slow burn anticipation is casually swatted. Grint has always managed to avoid questions about any real-life girlfriends in a similarly offhand way. Yeah, sort of, maybe. Not, um, yet. He once suggested that he might have more time for girls once filming had finished on Potter . Well? “Um,” he says. “I’m not sure that I really want it at the moment.” Any close shaves? “I don’t know. I’ve always been open for it to happen. But it’s never been something that I’ve felt I’ve needed.” Four days after our meeting, anyway, a Sunday tabloid reports that Grint is in a relationship with an actress called Georgia Groome, star of 2008 film Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging . Maybe Grint was the fibber, maybe the tabloid; “a close pal” is the story’s source. In Soho Grint tells me he’s never suffered a kiss-and-tell, but when I ask if he feels at risk of it he says: “Yeah. I do think about that. It’s always in the back of your head. Not so much kiss and tell. Just the trusting. With anyone, even with friends. You’ve got to think of what people’s intentions are.” The thought of being sold out must make him angry, I say. “I can’t remember the last time I got angry,” he says. “He lived his teenage years under a spotlight,” says Heyman, “but one of the many things I love about Rupert is that he just gets on with it. He enjoys life.” Lewis agrees. “He’d rather focus on all the fun stuff he can do than talk about anything too serious.” And it’s with fun stuff, in the Soho bar, that we start to round up our chat. Grint tells me about a tortoise-like gadget of his that he rediscovered, buried deep in a corner of his dressing room, when filming was finished and he had to clear out. He also unearthed birthday cards that were eight or nine years out of date, the dressing room having been his home away from home since the millennium. “It felt like packing up on the last day of school,” he says. I’d heard that everyone – cast, crew, caterers – had spent this last day bawling. I take a guess, and say: you were the only one who didn’t cry, right? “At first,” he says. “And I wasn’t expecting to. But…” He lets himself think about it. “It was when I saw Dan crying.” He shakes his head. “Then it really hit me. I’d never seen him that upset. It was just really, really raw.” The Potter cast have since scattered. Radcliffe, the extravagant one, is performing in a Broadway play. Watson, the clever one studied history in the US. And the easygoing one? He shrugs. He’ll keep acting. He’s done a couple of films already, post- Potter , roles as an assassin’s apprentice in Wild Target and as an ill-behaved leisure centre employee in Cherrybomb . This latter film featured the memorable sight of Grint snorting cocaine and having sex. Critics didn’t love either, much, but they picked out Grint for praise. “Confirms he has the acting chops for the long haul,” wrote Time Out of Cherrybomb . “Looks set for better things.” Quieter things, too, I hope. Grint says that getting used to Potter being over has been “like grieving”, but when the hubbub around this last film dulls he should, at last, be able to move around in public a little more freely. Perhaps start to go to music festivals again. Phelps told me that, last year, when Grint and he were on a road trip around Europe, Grint was stopped for photographs even in a remote hamlet way up in the Alps. Recently, some wag posted a video on YouTube showing Grint being harassed, one night, by a bunch of drunks. “Garn,” says one of them, encouraging his mates, “show Ron Weasley yer willy.” Grint has made many millions since getting a part in Harry Potter , but it wasn’t all in payment for the acting. Phelps told me a story about a time, not long ago, when Grint came to to visit him in his hometown. None of Phelps’s friends were greatly interested in Potter and one bloke, plonking down on a neighbouring stool in the pub, asked Grint what job he did on the films. I can picture, perfectly, the grateful, graceful shrug he must have given when replying, oh, nothing. He was just part of the crew. Rupert Grint Harry Potter Harry Potter JK Rowling Daniel Radcliffe Emma Watson Alfonso Cuarón Family Science fiction and fantasy Tom Lamont guardian.co.uk