Harry Potter star, Evanna Lynch has opened up about how she “struggled” to live up to her infamous character from the movie franchise.
This isn’t the first time the Termonfeckin actress has been candid about her mental health, and speaking on the Irishman Abroad podcast this week she shared that she feels she can finally step out of the shadow of her much loved character, Luna Lovegood.
“I’m very different from her in many ways, but at her essence, she has self acceptance, acceptance of her weirdness, her oddness, her eccentricities and that really liberates people and that’s what lets them accept themselves.”
Continuing she said; “So I kind of felt exhausted at trying to live up to people’s expectations, trying to keep it sweet, trying to keep it always positive and I had noticed that whenever I bottle up my feelings, I pay for it, there’s a cost, I always end up emotionally exhausted, burnt out, or I snap at somebody and that is a much worse reaction than just being real and honest and maybe disappointing people with my truth.”
“I don’t want to feel like I’m trapped by his character and I don’t want to feel like I’m oppressing things,” she added.
This comes as the end of this year marks a whopping twenty years since the release o the first film, and some of it’s best known character will be reuniting for a HBO special on New Year’s Day.
Evanna, who has recently released her memoir, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting, shared how important the character of Luna has been to her as she navigated her own difficult times, struggling with an eating disorder; “Throughout my life that character has been like a guide map for me if I want to give people that permission to accept themselves too and the truth of me isn’t that character so if I’m to live that, I have to own these things that are maybe dark and shameful.”
“I struggled with that feeling of ‘I don’t have any triggering event that caused this, I don’t have any excuse for having a big problem. I think people can reduce it down to one triggering event and that’s the reason and for me it wasn’t, it was deeper, it was more existential.”
The 30-year-old added; “And I remember my mum used to ask me at the time ‘what have we done, what did we not do, what did we not give you?’ and as you can see from the book, they gave everything, they put everything into my recovery, they put everything into helping me develop as a person before that and I didn’t know how to answer that.”
“I’d try to tell her as a child ‘it’s nothing to do with you at all’- that is mental illness. You can’t control it.”
