“Harry Potter” star Tom Felton is currently filming the series “Gandhi,” where he plays Josiah Oldfield, the future Mahatma’s friend in London.
Part of the series, produced by Sameer Nair for India’s Applause Entertainment and directed by Hansal Mehta, follows the young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi when he was in London to study law and missing vegetarian food. It examines how Gandhi’s chance discovery of a vegetarian restaurant brings him to the lesser-known Vegetarian Society of London, of which Oldfield is one of the founders. This chance meeting proves to be formative for Gandhi, as it is Oldfield who first discovers the writer in him and encourages him to pen articles for the Vegetarian Magazine.
“It is about the relationship between the two of them and how they found each other at exactly the right time. And how without meeting each other, their lives would have definitely been different,” Felton tells Variety while on location for the series in London. “Certainly, Gandhi’s would have been and therefore the whole world would have been a very different place.”
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Felton, who is not a vegetarian in real life, prepared for the role of Oldfield through a lot of reading and consultation with his 93-year-old grandfather, who he describes as being “very wise in history, so he knew exactly who Oldfield was.”
“Most of my research has been on the spot, literally live with the director. That’s the best thing about working with not only an Indian crew, but someone that knows a lot more about it than than Wikipedia,” Felton says. On getting the body language of the character right with few images available, Felton says that shooting at real locations dating back to Oldfield’s era helped him slide into the period, as did the costumes.
Felton has worked with crews around the world and loved working with an Indian group. “It’s just remarkably calm, efficient like I’ve never seen before. Something that will usually take twice as long takes half the time, but everyone seems to just be very calm and chilled about it,” Felton says. “But more importantly, they understand English banter, as I would call it. So within day one or day two, we’re already insulting each other in a very friendly way.”
The most challenging part of the shoot for Felton was keeping up with Pratik Gandhi, no relation of the Mahatma, who plays Gandhi. “He is astonishing at getting into character very quickly and I have never heard him slip one line. I’ve slipped quite a few. It’s amazing to be surrounded by such effortless talent. It brings your game up,” Felton says.
Next up for Felton is another period piece, “Canyon of the Dead,” where he and Abigail Breslin play pioneering American archaeologists Ann Axtell and Earl Morris, respectively. “She was the first female archaeologist to publish in North America. And she was shunned a little bit and it was even made to be put under children’s literature, because the idea of a woman being a bonafide archaeologist back then wasn’t thought of, so it’s another maverick story,” Felton says. The film is being sold at the Cannes Film Market later this month.
The actor has also completed a Kazakhstan-shot sci-fi film currently known as “Project Darwin.” While he’s not at liberty to reveal too much, Felton says that the film is “relevant to today’s society” and that his character “was very fun to play, and he goes through a big change for half of the film to the second half and that was quite challenging.”
It has been nearly 13 years since the release of the last “Harry Potter” film, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” but Felton still gets stopped on the street by fans. He played Draco Malfoy, arch rival to Daniel Radcliffe’s Potter.
“Even without the blonde hair, they still seem to recognize me. But quite delightfully, everyone that says ‘hello,’ is always polite, even to the bad guy,” Felton says. “And I find it amazing that ‘Harry Potter’ spread so far across the world, such as India and Japan. Everywhere seems to have known of it. Now there’s a whole new generation of Potter fans — a lot of fans that approach me are 13-14-15, and they weren’t even born when the first book was written. So to see it being passed down generation to generation is really cool. Something that I’m very proud of.”