GETTING to meet the actor who starred as the young wizard Harry Potter in the blockbuster movie series proved to be a truly magical moment for Limerick fan Rebekah Moran last weekend.
Twenty one-year-old Rebekah from Corbally has been under the enchanted spell of JK Rowling’s fantasy novels since she was seven-years-old. And last weekend, the UL student was bedazzled as she managed to conjure up two VIP tickets for the Dublin premiere of Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe’s new film ‘What If’.
“I entered a competition on ‘Ireland AM’. You had to write a story about falling in love with your best friend. I wrote about how Harry Potter was my best pal growing up and then how later I fell for the actor Daniel Radcliffe,” Rebekah explains.
“I collapsed onto the floor in tears when I found out I had won. I really wasn’t expecting it. I was supposed to take my best friend Ciara but she was working so I brought my mum to thank her for introducing me to the books,” she said.
A past pupil of Laurel Hill, Rebekah first fell for Harry Potter as a young child when her mother Teresina read a chapter from the best-selling books every night at bedtime to her and her young brother Denis. A diehard fan and avid collector of all things associated with the bespectacled wizard, the bookish Corbally lass hasn’t touched her feet on terra firma since her enchanting encounter with the dashing young Potter in the Capital.
“I was in the special fan section of the VIP area and when Daniel Radcliffe arrived at the premiere he walked straight past the media and paparazzi and headed straight over to his fans. He was a true gentleman,” she coos.
“I got to meet him and get autographs and get my photo taken with him. I brought a programme from the ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan’, the Broadway production he was in with Pat Shortt. I told him Pat was from Limerick too and he was singing his praises as an actor,” Rebekah reveals.
“He spent half an hour with fans and I was amazed by how nice he was. They say you should never meet your idols but he was really charming,” she said.
Still very much under Harry Potter’s spell then, Rebekah even gave Radcliffe’s new film, a rom-com about a medical school dropout who falls in love with his best friend, a big thumbs up.
“He’s played lots of different kinds of roles since Harry Potter and is just a brilliant actor. I know I seem a bit obsessed. In school they use to call me the Harry Potter girl,” she confesses.
