Word: pottered
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...Harry Potter movies are filmed primarily at a former airplane factory 20 miles outside London. Inside Leavesden Studios, as it's called, is a dreamlike mishmash of Harry Potter's past: bits and pieces of the Whomping Willow, signs from the stores in Diagon Alley, the smashed-up remains of giant chess pieces from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Honestly, is this any place to raise a child...
...that's what's been going on at Leavesden for the past five years. When Daniel Radcliffe was cast as Harry (after a small part in The Tailor of Panama), he was only 11. Emma Watson (who plays nerd-girl Hermione Granger) was 10; Rupert Grint (Potter pal Ron Weasley), almost 12. Now, with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire set to open in two weeks, they've spent a third of their lives making movies. They've gone from children to teenagers entirely within the weird, closed bubble of the Potterverse...
When Warner Bros. set about filming the Harry Potter books, it wasn't exactly uppermost in everyone's mind that the company would essentially be opening a boarding school for child actors (who must spend three hours a day with an on-set tutor). "When you start, you don't really anticipate that it will last seven films," says David Heyman, who has been a producer on all four movies (he calls himself "the longest-standing student at Hogwarts"). "It is its own universe. But we try to maintain a real normalcy about...
Social life on Planet Potter doesn't always mirror that in J.K. Rowling's books. Radcliffe and Grint aren't actually very close. "Rupert I don't know that well," Radcliffe admits. "Which is weird. I think it's partly because he finished school before I did. Emma, I do know exceptionally well. Very, very well." Um, so did they ever, like ... you know? "No. But I had a big crush on her when I first met her, definitely. But she's more like a sister now, so it would be a bit incestuous. It's too weird...
...Harry Potter set is an exclusive microcosm, one that comes with its own delights and its own dangers--in other words, it's not all that different from Hogwarts. "There's never been a day when I've thought, I really don't want to be here," Radcliffe says. "Because for me, it's this or it's school. And I've never really loved being in school that much." He does leave Leavesden from time to time. This month he's acting in an Australian coming-of-age movie called December Boys. But the outside world can take...