Cameron Diaz played a part in the “Harry Potter” movies, but she probably doesn’t know it.
In Tom Felton’s new memoir Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, he explained that Daniel Radcliffe used a photo of Diaz to help him pretend to fly his broomstick.
Felton, who played Draco Malfoy alongside Radcliffe’s Harry Potter, wrote, “The approach was that if a piece of magic or any kind of special effect could be achieved practically, that was the best way to do it.”
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He added, according to Insider, “This was especially true in the early days, when the visual effects teams had less-advanced technology at their disposal.”
“The broomstick was a metal pole fitted with a deeply uncomfortable bike saddle,” Felton recalled of filming the Quidditch scenes, which were done in a studio with blue or green screens.
“There were stirrups for your feet and a harness to stop you falling. They strapped you to the pole so you couldn’t fall and they had a more elaborate see-saw device to move you up and down, left and right. They blew fans in your face to make it look as if you had the wind in your hair.”
Beyond The Wand, round the world 🌎 Thank you for everyone who has asked for Beyond The Wand to be released in their language and in their country ❤️ Absolutely surrealhttps://t.co/24008FDl7F pic.twitter.com/xKYG5zotyz
— Tom Felton (@TomFelton) October 6, 2022
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Felton said that with the scenes being edited later on, it was “important that all the players were looking in the right direction for the shot,” so a crew member attempted to hold a tennis ball with a long pole and orange tape on it.
“When the first assistant director shouted ‘Dragon!’ or ‘Bludger!’ you had to look at the tennis ball like it was, well, a dragon or a bludger,” he said.
Felton went on: “Sometimes there would be more than one tennis ball up there, and as one looked very much like another, after a while they gave us more individual objects to stare at. We chose pictures of something or somebody close to our hearts. Daniel Radcliffe had a picture of a particularly beautiful Cameron Diaz.”
Meanwhile, fishing fan Felton “chose a picture of an even more beautiful carp.”