Harry Potter and the Poisoned Chalice
By Fidelma Cook (April 10, 2005)
Source: The Mail

THE queue snaked for half-a-mile outside Pineapple Studios in London’s West End Thousands of Oriental-looking teenagers huddled together in the icy wind – singing and laughing while waiting for their chance to become part of movie history.

Their audition was the culmination of a worldwide search for a start on a scale not seen in the movie industry since Vivien Leigh was chosen to play Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 blockbuster Gone With The Wind.

At stake this time was the role of Cho Chang, the Chinese first love of Harry Potter in the fourth film of the series, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire.

Katie Leung, the pretty, Scots-born daughter of a millionaire entrepreneur, was just one of and astonishing 4,000 that February day hoping to catch the eyes of the casting panel.

Film-maker Warner Bros. had even used Chinese television in its quest to find the perfect English-speaking Oriental actress to play Cho Chang, the girl who would capture Harry’s heart and give the young wizard his first kiss.

And as the hopefuls shuffled through Pineapple Studios, it was stunning Katie Leung who put a spell on the casting panel and left them in no doubt – she was Cho Chang.

But today, barely more than a year since she was plucked from her comfortable middle-class life and just six months before she will be seen on screen, 17-year-old Katie has already discovered a deeply unpleasant and sinister side of fame.

Being Harry’s Cho-sen one, as she is called, is apparently just too much for many Potter fans to bear. The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Katie, a sixth-former at a £5000-a-year college in Glasgow, has become the victim of a new and disturbing dark underbelly of Pottermania, turning her dream into a poisoned chalice.

Despite being deliberately kept under wraps by Warner – without public appearances, interviews, or official pictures – the slender and shy student has become a hate figure for obsessive Potter fans.

Scores of fake websites have sprung up, some apparently giving her thoughts and feelings in diary form. There are photographs purporting to be of Katie, and many are of obviously older, more experienced girls in revealing poses.

Most disturbing are several ‘hate Katie’ sites where youngsters are encouraged to explain in graphic detail why they loathe the dark-haired beauty. One site has e-mails with statements such as: ‘I hate Katie Leung till the end of time.’

Another states: ‘I hate her because she is stupid, dumb, an idiot and gets to play Cho Chang, and oh...she gets to kiss Daniel Radcliffe [the Harry Potter actor].’

Other comments from fans in far-flung countries such as the Philippines and China attack her looks as ‘ugly’ and ‘bizarrely too Eastern’, poke fun at her Scottish background and mock her soft Scottish accent.

There are racist comments too crude to print, many using the coarsest language. Some come from angry fans of established Korean and Chinese actresses who failed to get an audition. This is because Potter creator J.K. Rowling insisted that the girl whose caress transforms the bespectacled Harry from boy to love-struck adolescent has to be a complete unknown.

There are other sites that denounce Katie and say that 'Neighbours' star Michelle Ang should have been given the role.

Many of the remarks, it must be said, are probably the outpourings of troubled adolescents who fell in love with Harry Potter and the world of Hogwarts Academy when they were at Primary School.

And now, with the new film, comes a kiss – and it has sparked this torrent of spiteful comment.

SO FAR, nothing has appeared about the hate campaign on J.K. Rowling’s own website. But she is using it to warn fans of unauthorized sites purporting to offer copies of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the series, to be published on July 16. Already almost 11 million copies have been stockpiled – the biggest print run in publishing history.

Katie, the daughter of a wholesaler of Chinese food and his first wife, won her dream role after attending the auditions on a whim.

Her father, Peter Leung, lives in a £400,000 detached house in the former steel town of Motherwell, near Glasgow. As a father of two girls and two boys, he is worried and frightened for his eldest daughter.

‘I have seen these sites,’ says Mr. Leung, 42. ‘I have looked at every one of them. It is rather frightening when you see things like “hate Katie”.

‘It is incredible, really. I can’t make sense of it, although I know how popular Harry Potter is.

‘Katie is only 17 and hasn’t even appeared on film. No one knows her, has seen her or heard her speak, yet there are all these things on the internet. Unfortunately I know she has seen them too. She reads them all and it is a great pressure on her.

‘At the moment she is filming in London and won’t be home for quite some time. She phones me, of course, but I don’t really know much of what is going on. Katie’s life has changed overnight.

‘With these websites, I cannot even thing what may happen when the film eventually comes out. In a way I’m dreading it.

‘She’s been told she mustn’t give interviews or speak to anybody until the producers say it’s time. It’s all happened so fast. We saw they were looking for a Chinese girl when we were watching Chinese cable TV. She just wanted to try it.’

Mr. Leung married Katie’s mother Kar Wai Li, now 38, in Luton, Bedfordshire, in 1986. They met when Hong Kong-born Mr. Leung moved to Scotland to open a Chinese takeaway in Inverkeithing, Fife. They are now divorced and Mr. Leung is married to Katie’s stepmother, Cecilia, 33.

He has become a millionaire by building up his business to include Regent, a successful restaurant in Glasgow, and Jade Palace Trading, a Chinese wholesale firm. But he is still quite bemused by all that has happened to Katie.

‘I don’t know why she went for the audition – she just did. She has never talked about acting or shown and interest in it. She was never even in a school play. She was just a typical girl studying for her Highers [the Scottish equivalent of A-levels], not knowing what she would do with her life.

‘Now,’ he sighs, ‘I think she wants to be an actress when she leaves school. I am very proud of her, but it is all very sudden and all very strange, very confusing.

‘As far as I’m concerned she is still at school, except that now she is filming and has a tutor with her. She hasn’t left school yet.’

As ever, great secrecy has surrounded the Potter set and the filming of some of the most exciting scenes. On the book and film, Harry, as the age of 14, falls for the beautiful and dazzlingly talented Cho while she’s going out with his schoolfriend and something rival Cedric Diggory.

The plot of the book and the dramatic, and ultimately tragic, backdrop to Harry’s infatuation with Cho is the staging of the Triwizard Tournament at Hogwarts.

At stake is the Goblet of Fire of the title, with one champion selected to represent each of the three wizarding schools across the world and compete in a series of trials.

There is Viktor Krum, played by Serbian actor Predrag Bjelac, from Durmstrang School; the hauntingly beautiful Fleur Delacour, played by Clemence Poesy, from Beauxbatons; and the dashing Cedric Diggory, played by Robert Pattinson, for Hogwarts. When the Goblet – both the prize and the selector of competitors – gives up Harry’s name as a shock fourth contended, the action takes a sinister turn.

Harry is officially too young and inexperienced a student to tackle the life-threatening tasks, yet much of the time that he should be preparing for his ordeals he spends dreaming of Cho and trying to come to terms with the jealousy, uncertainty and thrill he feels each time he sees her.

HE INVITED her to the school’s Yule Ball only to find she is already going with Cedric Diggory. Indeed, the much publicized romance and kiss with Cho is made only by one of the darkest and most horrifying plot-lines of Harry Potter so far.

In the final stages of the Triwizard Tournament, Cedric and Harry are transported to a graveyard, where the older boy is brutally killed by the dagger of Harry’s evil nemesis, Voldemort. Until now he has always been a disembodied force but, with his strength growing, he takes on human form, and in the film is played by Ralph Fiennes.

It is against this death and destruction that Harry’s fledgling romance is set and the kiss, much vaunted and the cause of such jealousy and hostility towards Katie Leung, is in reality little more than a chaste peck. The romance that follows is marred by Cho’s grief over Cedric’s death and her jealousy over Harry’s closeness to Hermione Granger, his stalwart friend from the beginning of the series.

Like their fans, the young stars are growing up rapidly. British director Mike Newell believes he is in a race against time with the original trio of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. Whether Katie’s role will continue in the next film is uncertain. Her father, still bemused at the speed of what has happened so far, says he knows nothing.

‘Privately, I would guess this will be the last one for which they will be suitable and almost certainly that they will want to do,’ he says. ‘Any minute now, it will not be cool for a 16 or 17-year-old to be Harry Potter.’

With each instalment, the Harry Potter phenomenon is becoming less childlike and more adult and dark. There is very little of the childish wonderment that characterized the first book in The Goblet Of Fire. Instead deceit, desire and murder are mingled with the magic.

For Katie Leung, who is about to be thrust into the very public world in which Radcliffe and his co-stars have lived for several years, it is an exciting and unsettling time.

How her story, and Cho and Harry’s ends remains to be seen.

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