Do you recall how you felt the first day on the set of Harry Potter?
MATTHEW LEWIS: Yeah—it's weird, towards the end of the shoot is very vivid and the very start is as well, it's all the middle bits that blur into one. I can remember quite clearly being 11 years old on the first one. We were at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland and it was the scene with Madam Hooch, where we have the broomstick lesson and Neville flies off and crashes into the wall.

I was used to television sets but this film set was a scale of which I was very unprepared for. It was enormous. Also, just to step into that world that I had read about for years and was such a huge fan of, to suddenly put the robes on, was spectacular. Chris Columbus, [the director,] came over and explained what was happening and about how this particular scene and this whole set piece was basically about Neville and about me—no pressure, you know?

They looked after me very much and I had a week of my life just flying on this broomstick around this beautiful castle in the North of England. I thought, "If this is what my career is, if this is what I'm going to get paid to do for a living, then this is the dream."

At a young age going onto that set, with actors such as Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman, were you aware of their stature as these respected Shakespearean actors?
LEWIS: Yes and no—maybe not so much on the level of Shakespeare at that age, I was sort of unaware of the caliber of who I was working with, but definitely their fame and their ability to a certain degree. There were a lot of things that those guys had been in and done that I was a huge fan of.

At the time, I was a ridiculously big fan of Rik Mayall, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago. Rik was cast to play Peeves the Poltergeist in the first film, and unfortunately he was cut out in the end because of time issues, but he was superb in it. I was a big fan of all of his comedy like Drop Dead Fred, Blackadder, and Bottom—all of these classic British sitcoms.

I sat next to him at the read-through and I was completely lost for words. He really took me under his wing and started chatting me through the different characters behind the camera, who everybody was and what their job was, and he signed my script. It was a huge moment to be in that read-through surrounded by all of these amazing people who I'd seen on TV and then they were friendly and so unassuming.

I still had a lot of fear, a lot of trepidation that lasted many, many years until I was older before I really spoke to them on a similar level. Rik definitely set the ball rolling there in terms of my comfort around those guys; they were just human beings.

Coming out of those films, was there something in particular you found yourself looking for in roles? Were you reading a lot of scripts?
LEWIS: It was an exciting time and quite strange [having done] them for 10 years but I was very ready to finish when we came to the last one. After playing the character for that amount of time, I wanted to do different things, I wanted to find new characters, and explore new avenues.

I literally had no idea what I was going on to... I wasn't keen to jump back into a robe and be a wizard in something anytime soon but [I was interested in] anything that came up, really. I felt very much that I was starting at the bottom rung again and that being in Harry Potter was no gimmick; I was going to have to leave that behind to lose the Neville Longbottom tag and prove that I could do other things, learn, and understand.