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Luna Lovegood actress: Is J.K. Rowling concealing a real wizarding world?

'Is this all an elaborate cover up and the wizards are howling with laughter at how we’ve accepted this,' 

(Murray Close)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2

What if magic is real? Let’s be honest, it’s a question we Potterheads have all asked ourselves, and it’s one Evanna Lynch, who played unique Ravenclaw Luna Lovegood, ponders in week 8 of EW’s Binge podcast.

“Every now and then I’ll just be like, ‘Is this all an elaborate cover up and the wizards are howling with laughter at how we’ve accepted this?’” Lynch tells hosts Marc Snetiker and C. Molly Smith in the episode, which is all about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2 and recaps the 10 goodbyes, from Professor McGonagall’s piertotum locomotor virginity to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named himself.  

She continues, “I start to get paranoid. ‘Is J.K. Rowling the only Muggle in the world who knows about the secrets and she’s somehow been entrusted?’ It’s almost like it reinforces the barrier between us and them if there’s one magical Muggle who’s making it seem like it’s a fantasy world and what if it isn’t? What if she’s covering it up? That would make me crazy!”

Us too, which is why we took it a step further: What would she do if she saw a Dark Mark appear in the sky right now? “I would go home, fetch my cat, and probably pack my bag,” Lynch explains. “I’d probably flee to a magical location, like you know… there are vortexes on the Earth, places with mystical power, like in Ireland there’s a lot of them. We have fairy forests and hills and places that have a lot of ancient magic. I’d probably go somewhere there.” For those stateside, there’s Ilvermorny…

Clearly, Lynch takes her Potter seriously and to heart. She’s a big fan of the books — seemingly one of the biggest on set — and that very much affected the way she saw Luna. “It was more than just a job to me. It was so precious,” she says. “She’s such an important person to me. She’s helped me through so much that I felt I just wanted to protect her spirit and preserve her spirit. There are so many actors, and not that this is a bad thing, but it will just be an email sent to their inbox and they’ll be like, ‘Okay, I’ll try on this person for today,’ and for me it was just so much more.”

More specifically, she wanted to protect Luna’s individuality. “She was completely authentic and herself, and her own self was so weird and so odd to everyone else and made everyone uncomfortable, but she just wore her oddness with so much self acceptance and grace,” Lynch details. “I felt like an odd teenager growing up and I felt like there were a lot of [things] about myself that I wanted to hide, that I wasn’t comfortable with, and every time I would read Luna, I would just feel this enormous relief.”

“Here was someone who was so much more odd than I, but who didn’t question it, who just accepted it about herself, and the way she did it, it made it that however she was, was perfect.”

BY MARC SNETIKER, C. MOLLY SMITH