It's Cho time
(June 29, 2007)
Source: Evening Standard

It's Cho time

Get ready for Potter fever once again: and this time, the girl in the frame is Katie Leung, who plays the object of Harry's desire. Lydia Slater is enchanted.

Katie Leung may be about to become the most hated girl in the world. She plays Cho Chang, the longterm crush of Harry Potter, and in the next instalment of the opus ¨C The Order of the Phoenix ¨C finally gets to kiss the wizard whose specs and lightning scar adorn the bedroom walls of millions of pre-teen girls. So, naturally, she is rather apprehensive about how it¡¯s going to be received. "It's the moment everyone's been waiting for," she says wryly. "People want to watch Harry's first kiss because they've watched him grow up. You want to get it perfect and so there's a lot of pressure."

In fact, poor Katie had several sleepless nights before the pivotal smooch was shot.

"I was so nervous," she confides in her soft Scottish accent. "Everyone kept going on about it and taking the piss." On the day, practically the entire cast and crew hung about hoping to catch a glimpse of the action, but, sensitive to the feelings ¨C not to mention the limited acting experience ¨C of his leading lady, director David Yates insisted on a closed set.

"He shut a lot of the monitors behind the set and dimmed the lights in the room," she says. "Usually there are about 50 people fixing the lights, but there was only one cameraman. So it was nice; I felt very relaxed."

And so is Harry Potter a good kisser? "Actually, it was a lot of fun," she says. "He is a good kisser. I'm not saying that because I have to, he is, honestly." (Later, an insider tells me "they were really going for it".) She smiles and blushes slightly, flicking back her long hair from her face.

We are sitting in the basement kitchen of a grand house in the East End where the ES shoot has been taking place. The sitting room has been filled with balloons, and Katie, clad in various designer frocks, has been posing with them, sitting on a carousel horse. But she is not a natural show-off and is obviously far more comfortable down here, back in her civvies, sipping tea.

With her round face scrubbed clean of make-up, wide chocolatebrown eyes and teenage uniform (undone Converse over opaque tights, a khaki bubble skirt and a layering of different vests), she looks far younger than her 19 years.

Alas, her faint embarrassment on the subject of embracing Harry Potter appears to stem only from shyness, not because there is anything blush-making between Daniel Radcliffe and herself. She didn't even see him cavorting stripped to the essentials in Equus. "I remember when I first met him," she recalls. "I expected him to be reserved, but he was really welcoming."

Despite all the online gossip about friction between the cast, she has nothing but praise for all her fellow junior thesps, and seems to be positively awestricken by the many talents of Emma Watson, aka goody-goody Hermione Granger. "She just knows what she wants; she's very confident and so intelligent; she got so many A-stars in her exams," she says breathlessly. "I don't know how she manages it."

Her best friend on set is Bonnie Wright who plays Ginny Weasley ¨C ironically, the girl who displaces Cho in Harry Potter's affections. "Everyone expects us to be rivals, but we hang out a lot," she says.

Perhaps most shockingly, she says that in real life Tom Felton, who plays Draco Malfoy, and Daniel Radcliffe are "best buddies".

Actually, this shouldn't be at all surprising since the pair have been starring together since they were 12. Katie, however, is a relative newcomer to the set, since she only won the plum role of Cho Chang when she was 16; The Order of the Phoenix is her second venture into Harry Potter territory.

Prior to this, she had a sheltered upbringing in Scotland and never dreamed of being an actress. Her parents, Peter, a businessman, and Kar Wai Li, who works for a law firm, divorced when she was three years old.

Katie and her younger brother Jonathan remained with their father. "I've never asked why," she says firmly, "and it doesn't bother me. I was so young when they split up, I don't remember much. But they get on so well, it's unbelievable."

When she was five, her father married again. Katie says she is devoted to stepmother Cecilia, and stepbrother Darren (she also has a halfsister, Nicole, from her mother's second marriage, but sees her rather less often since they moved last year to Hong Kong). Katie and her brothers were brought up on the outskirts of Motherwell and sent to Hamilton College, a private school in South Lanarkshire.

Not only was she not the star of her school's thespian activities, she went out of her way to make as little impact as possible. "You know the odd girl who's always sitting alone in the corner, and never speaks? I was that person," she says with a giggle. "I was ridiculously shy. I could go for a whole day without speaking to anybody, and I didn't enjoy putting up my hand to ask a question. So it's very strange that I've come into something like this where everybody's watching me. I was never a drama queen. I always thought you'd have to be very confident to act, and I wasn't like that."

The way she won her role seems as magically coincidental as anything JK Rowling could have dreamed up. Her father was falling asleep in front of the television one night when he saw a news item that casting directors were seeking a 16-year-old of Oriental appearance to play Harry Potter's love interest. "As soon as my dad heard it, he came running to my room and asked me if I'd be interested," she says. "At first I shrugged it off. I thought, don't be stupid, I'm not going all the way to London for a casting I'm never going to get. But it was a Saturday, I was off school, he was off work, so we both headed down."

"I thought there would be 20 or 30 girls at the most," she says naively, "but the queue went on for miles and miles. But I'd gone all the way down there and that was what I'd come for, so I wasn't going to give up."

After a few hours waiting outside Pineapple Studios in Covent Garden, she arrived in the first room, which had a wall of mirrors.

"Someone told me, don't look into the mirrors, there are people on the other side watching you. So while the other girls were slapping on the make-up and fixing their hair in the mirrors, I just stood there."

"Then they brought us into the second room, and the first thing one of the casting directors said was, "Has anyone come from Scotland?" I was the only person who put her hand up, and I saw the casting director whispering, 'Keep her behind.' "

When they took a Polaroid of her, she says, she was the happiest she'd ever been in her life. "Happier even than when I got the part." She and her father then had lunch in a tiny restaurant where they coincidentally met a couple who also hailed from Motherwell. "I told them what I'd been doing, and the man said, 'I've got a feeling you'll get it,' " she reveals, opening her eyes wide.

But of course, there was more to her success than simply fate; an exhaustive interview process involving several acting workshops whittled down the hopefuls from thousands to 200 to a final five. "At that point, I was determined I was going to get it," she says.

She found herself in the Leavesden studios in Watford, singing nursery rhymes for the director Mike Newell, which for somebody shy ought to have been an excruciating ordeal. "It was fun," she contradicts. "When I told my friends about it, they couldn't believe it. But I wasn't myself, I was very confident; there was adrenaline rushing through me."

After all this, the eventual result came as a slight anticlimax, especially as she wasn't allowed to tell anyone that she'd won the part. "After a while, all my friends just assumed I hadn't got it," she says; which was her first and probably toughest acting lesson.

Actually, I should imagine the Harry Potter set is a pretty unforgiving place to cut your acting teeth. It's not just the huge budget, the fact that most of the pupils have been acting since the cradle, nor the staff room's roster of hallowed British talent: Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, David Thewlis, Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson (did they leave anyone out?); it's also that the film's heavy reliance on special effects means that much of the acting has to be done in front of a blue screen.

"It really tests your acting ability. You're trying to look as though you're flying, and you're holding out a wand pretending there are green sparks coming out the end of it, but nothing's happening at all. It's challenging,¡¯ she says, understatedly.

Katie is obviously a natural; her charming, unspoiled portrayal of Cho has won her a global fanbase ¨C mostly little girls, it's true, but including a gang of forty-something taxi drivers who recently ambushed her as she walked past a Scottish station, chanting 'Harry Potter's girlfriend!'

Unfortunately, she may have paid her last visit to Hogwarts, as Cho's unintentional betrayal of Harry in The Order of the Phoenix causes him to look elsewhere for sources of consolation (although of course there¡¯s always the faint possibility that Cho may be resurrected in the final Harry Potter book this summer). In the meantime, she is hoping to kick-start her acting career outside its grim walls. She has just moved to London, to a Battersea flat that she shares with a girlfriend, in order to be closer to her agent, and is hoping to net some meaty emotional roles ¨C if, that is, she doesn't abandon acting in favour of an artsbased degree at Central Saint Martins, her other cherished ambition.

"It's daunting at first," she says of her new independence. "I've led a pretty sheltered life, my mum and dad have been quite protective of me, but I'm really enjoying it. My dad realises that if I want to be an actress, I need to be in London." Her mother is the one with the qualms ¨C "she's scared nobody's going to cook for me and I'm not going to bother," she says. I'm sure there's no need to worry: Katie strikes me as one of the most level-headed, sensible young women I've met in a long time.

She doesn't have a boyfriend of any description, let alone a speccy wizard; she tells me her favourite recreation is playing the piano, and when I ask her what she's going to do with all her money, she says she might buy herself "a vest or two, but nothing I'm going to regret". In fact, she doesn't even know how much she has in the bank.

"I don't want to let it all go to my head," she explains, rather anxiously. "I've told my friends, 'If you find I've changed when I come back to Scotland, slap me.' " So far, I'd say she is quite safe from assault. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on general release on 12 July.

» Back