Interview: Katie Leung
(July 3, 2007)
Source: People

The fifth Harry Potter film '...Order Of The Phoenix' has a hotly anticipated release this summer. In the film, the refusal of the authorities to believe Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) has returned alarms Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). Realising they have to take up the fight themselves, they form a society called Dumbledore's Army and set about learning defensive spells, joined by several brave classmates.

This is the second of four interviews with one of Dumbledore's Army: Cho Chang

Katie Leung walks in the room calmly and shyly. She’s wearing a short sleeved white cardi over a grey top and is softly spoken with a delicate Scottish lilt.

One of the newer characters, Cho Chang first appears in ‘…Goblet of Fire’. She’s an intelligent and slightly older girl in Ravenclaw house who Harry develops something of a crush on, and she's left confused and heartbroken when her boyfriend Cedric is killed during the Triwizard Tournament by a newly returned Lord Voldemort. Cho likes Harry back, but her emotional state leaves her a bit of a wreck most the time.

Motherwell-born Katie first got into the Harry Potter films when her dad suggested she go along to an open casting. It took several hours of queuing and a quick screen test before she was invited back to a workshop, then was told she had the part. Her father says she had no previous acting experience, not even for a school play.

She’s asked if she’s been rather spoilt having Potter as a starting point for her acting career. “You can’t be picky as an actress. It’s a very unstable sort of career. I’m still in the early stages - I mean all I’ve done is Potter so I’d like to go on to all different sort of things.”

Was it any different the second time around? “I enjoyed it just as much, I mean it was different because I’d be coming back to familiar faces again. It’s kind of like a second home to me now, Leavesdon. So I felt much more relaxed in front of people, in front of the camera, and just kind of learned to ignore it. It was good. Sometimes when say, you’re talking to somebody, and the camera’s right in front of you and it’s kind of hard to ignore it, your eye just kind of catches it. But no, I mean you just get used to it.”

Now she’s one of the ‘familiar faces’ herself, did she help the even newer cast members such as Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood) fit in? “She was really sweet when she first came in, she did look incredibly nervous but I’d been through.

" We stayed in the same apartment for the first few weeks or so of filming and I just got to know her a little better, we went to the park and we watched movies together and stuff. She’s such a lovely girl and she’s handling it really well. And she’s such a big fan of the films, so I’m really happy for her.”

Is Katie coping with all the madness, interviews and promotional hype around the films? “I don’t really get used to it because you know it’s not like you’re constantly doing it. I just definitely didn’t realise it was going to be on such a big scale, doing all these interviews and the size of the premiere with all the fans, and getting to travel everywhere, it’s definitely not a bad thing! [The strangest thing I’ve been asked]… what would I change if I was Queen. Yeah something like that.”

Six journalists excitedly wait to see what it the answer is. “Er, I said I would make everyone ride bikes in London. Drivers are mental.”

In Glasgow everything’s just peachy is it, asks someone. “Yep!” she says proudly.

She finds it a “really strange and cringeworthy” experience watching herself back at the cinema. “When I watched it at the cinema it was one of the biggest screens in London with thousands of other people. There’s nothing really you can do about it, you just have to sit and watch and hopefully the reactions you get from the audience tell you whether you did a good job or not.”

Someone comments that with something the size of Harry Potter, Katie could be watching other films and see herself in a trailer, or a bus with her face on it will pass. She smiles. “Yeah, I think that happened when I was promoting the film in Japan last year. They had my big face on a bus and it was really, really strange you know, you travel halfway around the world and it’s just odd.”

You can travel for free when that happens, explains one of the journalists. That’s a law. She laughs.

As her mother attended the UK premiere, she took her father on the promo tour of Japan “on a break because he works really hard and stuff. When there was the premiere in Japan, he was watching at the side while I was doing interviews and he didn’t see me as his daughter, he just saw me as Cho Chang, which is really strange.”

Although ‘…Order of the Phoenix’ was a return to Leavesden and the cast members Katie had worked with before, there was one major change – David Yates replaced ‘…Goblet of Fire’ director Mike Newell. She describes them as both different and brilliant.

“I have a special bond with Mike because he took part in picking me for the role, and he was so great. But so was David, he was really gentle, he was really soft-spoken, and just he would sort of pull me to a corner and then he would give me his opinions on my character and ask what I thought about my character, then sort of have a little discussion. And he would tell me how my character was going through a really bad time and she’s really emotional, and just the way he said it made me want to cry! He was great at doing that and he put me in the mood, in the zone.”

One of the main scenes for Katie involves Harry Potter’s first kiss with Cho Chang. It’s highly anticipated and there’s a lot of teasing about it.

“I’m not sure how nervous [Dan Radcliffe] was but God I was so nervous, I was so worried. Just ‘cause people were constantly mentioning the kiss and all my friends were just asking me how it was going. The schedule’s always changing, so when you think it’s coming up they could set it back ‘til a week later and you wouldn’t know.

“The funny thing was, I was just having sleepless nights over it and when the set date finally came Daniel felt ill. He was dreading it that much!” she jokes.

In the end, the terrifying scene turned out to be “fine”. “We sort of had a laugh just before it, you know ‘Have you had your breathmint, have you brushed your teeth?’, stuff like that. It wasn’t 30 takes! Everyone says it was. It was much less than that.”

Now her friends as well as a lot of annoying journalists keep asking how it went. “It went by in such a flash and you know I think when you’re a bag of nerves nothing really sticks in your mind, it’s all just a blur.

“What I’m hoping for is it’s going to satisfy everyone’s perception of how the kiss is going to look. Hopefully when an audience see it they’ll think back to when they had their first kiss, you know it’s supposed to be a very awkward moment but sweet and very endearing at the same time. Everybody’s looking forward to it because a lot of people watched Harry Potter grow up and you can’t miss the kiss, you’ve got to see it!”

Katie might be recognised a little more often after this film is released. Currently very few people realise who she is, which she says is good. “I mean you don’t want people coming up to you all the time going ‘Oh look, there’s her’. But yeah, you get the odd few who just come up and say ‘I love the films’.

"Most of them aren’t sure, they come up and say ‘Are you the girl from Harry Potter?’ and sometimes I’ll say ‘No, but I get told that I look like her a lot. I get it all the time’. But sometimes I say yeah, and it’s nice things they say. They’re like ‘Oh I really enjoyed the films and I hope filming’s going well at the moment’.”

As for the future, Katie isn’t sure if she’ll carry on acting or if she’ll study graphic design or media at university, saying her indecisiveness is “one of the worst things” about her.

But there’s one thing she’s definite on – reading the last book. It’s already on pre-order “and I’ll probably go in at midnight to queue up and find out what happens.” Look out for her in a queue near you.

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