WASHINGTON — J.K Rowling, creator and author of the Harry Potter series, is a veritable chamber of secrets, but she generously let one out in the wake of actor Alan Rickman’s death last week.
According to Sam Haysom at the website Mashable, Rickman, who played the complicated villain Severus Snape in the film adaptation of the popular series, revealed in an interview that Rowling had given him — and only him — a clue to Snape’s character that formed the way the actor played him.
Rickman, 69, died after battle with cancer, on Jan. 14.
Rickman’s Snape became an unforgettable dimension of Rickman’s long career on stage and screen, and gave cinematic life to the half-blood Hogwarts master, who too, holds many secrets. In that interview, he described how Rowling helped him to prepare by not spoiling the end of the series. But there was one element she let slip, for a purpose.
She certainly didn’t tell me what the end of the story was going to be in any way at all, so I was having to buy the books along with everybody else,” Rickman said …
“No, she gave me one little piece of information, which I always said I would never share with anybody and never have, and never will. It wasn’t a plot point, or crucial in any tangible way, but it was crucial to me as a piece of information that made me travel down that road rather than that one or that one or that one.”
When asked by a fan on Twitter what that clue was, Rowling apparently felt it was time.
@jk_rowling Will you tell us the piece of information that you told Alan Rickman about Severus Snape? Or will that forever be a secret? 🙂
— Sarah (@sarahrosefrank) January 18, 2016
I told Alan what lies behind the word ‘always’. https://t.co/NHTJ5J6kxb
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 18, 2016
It was not revealed (warning: spoilers here) until the final book that Snape was “always” in love with Harry’s mother Lily, which explains his conflicted emotions when it came to the chief protagonist and his epic battle against Lord Voldemort. Rickman, who played Snape in all eight Harry Potter films, was lauded for his ability to convey the severe headmaster/professor’s moral ambiguities and inner turmoil with such memorable depth and rigor.
