The 18-year-old chosen to lay the girl who steals Harry Potter's heart had never even acted in a school play before, she tells Steve Pratt.
MANY youngsters long to be in a Harry Potter movie but only a few achieve their dream. It's happened for three young actors in the fourth film, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, although they won their roles in very different ways.
Eighteen-year-old Katie Leung had never even acted in a school play before being picked to play the girl who wins Harry Potter's heart. She responded to an open casting call after her father saw an advert on a Chinese TV channel and ended up beating 5,000 girls for the role of Cho Chang.
"The first audition was the one with the huge queue in Covent Garden in London which was just based on looks to see if we fitted the description," says Katie in her gentle Scottish accent.
"Two weeks later they called me back and asked me to go down to the studios. About 100 or 200 girls showed up there and we did a lot of improvisation with a drama teacher. We did a little scene from the film between Cho and Harry. Mike Newell the director was there as well.
"I was down to the last five and they asked me back for a screen test at the film studio where they were making the whole movie. I thought the fact that I was Scottish and the rest of the girls were English made me stand out. I wouldn't say I was nervous because I only went for fun, for the experience."
The hardest parts of filming were the underwater sequence and Yule Ball dance. She had to take diving lessons for one, and learn how to waltz for the other.
"I thought being a newcomer would be quite hard, but I wasn't the only one who was new and they were so friendly and down-to-earth which you don't expect because they're so famous," she says of her first experience of making a Harry Potter picture.
Stanislav Ianevski - Stan to his friends - was discovered by chance at his boarding school in North London after a Harry Potter casting director visited and overheard him talking in a corridor.
"I was late for registration and I caught the attention of the casting director, who asked me to go to the first casting," recalls the 20-year-lod Bulgarian. "I was supposed to go to a workshop which I didn't because I had an exam. I thought, 'that's it'. Then they gave me another chance to audition."
Eventually, he was cast as ace Quidditch player Victor Krum, despite never having acted professionally before. Like his character, Stan is fiercely competitive and enjoys playing a range of sports including tennis, football, rugby, athletics and swimming. What he'd never done was ride a broomstick, something he had to learn for the game of Quidditch. "It's quite tough," he admits.
So was scuba diving. "I was quite afraid of deep water and the very first time I was like, 'oh my God, I'm going underwater' but you get used to it and I had no fear at all by the end. That was probably the toughest training. There was always space for fun. There were days that were extremely long and everyone was tired but we'd always have jokes."
He was planning a career in business before Krum came along, now he'd like to continue acting.
Robert Pattinson, 19, had already made a film, Sword Of Xanten, before being cast as Cedric Diggory, head boy and Hogwart's official representative in the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. But his knowledge of the Harry Potter franchise was limited as he hadn't read the books or seen the films. He remedied that once he was cast in the movie.
"It's by far the biggest thing I've done and a great part," he says. He's appeared with Barnes Theatre Group in the past, taking roles in Our Town, Anything Goes and Tess Of The D'Urbevilles. He knows that he won't be back for the next instalment as Cedric - and be warned there's a plot spoiler coming up - dies, a victim of evil Lord Voldemort.
He was apprehensive about meeting the cast regulars in the bonding week before filming began. "I was so concerned about looking cool," he says. "It's weird seeing them. They are the most famous kids, I kept calling them famous. They're on their way to becoming icons. I used to try to be moody and stuff. I'm really good friends with a lot of people from the film. It was a long time, I was doing it for 11 months."
As for Cedric, he feels "he's a guy who does the right thing all the time". That doesn't stop him being harmed by Voldemort. Robert met Ralph Fiennes, who plays the wicked chap, at the theatre. "He was like, 'I stamped on your head'," he recalls.
Before his untimely end, he got to participate in lots of action scenes. Robert had three stunt doubles, although did a lot of it himself involving winches and harnesses. Dancing at the Yule Ball was less pleasant. His partner Katie Leung is a really good dancer but he's not. "I stepped on her toes," he says.
