Harry Potter Actor Bonnie Wright Wishes Ginny Weasley Got More Screen Time

The Harry Potter film series turned all of its actors into bonafide stars — but they didn’t all get equal chances to shine onscreen. On an episode of the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast, Bonnie Wright, who played Ron’s little sister, Ginny Weasley, said she wishes she would’ve gotten more screen time in order to make her performance more truthful to her character in the books.

In the interview, Wright said as the film series progressed, she would get anxious about portraying Ginny to the best of her abilities. “Oh gosh, will I do justice to this character that people love?” she recalled thinking. However, the process of adapting each novel into a two-hour film would leave out a lot of material that she could’ve worked with. “A lot of the scenes of every character were chopped down... so you didn’t really have as much to show in the film,” she said. “Sometimes that was a little disappointing, because there were parts of the character that just didn’t get to come through because there weren’t the scenes to do that. So that made me feel a bit anxious or just frustrated, I guess.”

That frustration was understandable, as in the books, Ginny became the title character’s love interest and eventual wife and was a strong supporting character as a result. But this wasn’t always reflected in the films, and as just a teenager and a small part of the massive Harry Potter crew, Wright wasn’t able to ask for more character development in the script. “There was just no room for much change in those scripts,” she explained. “There were a million executives going through them all.”

After the series concluded, the actor realized her anxiety was caused by this screentime dilemma, not from doubt of her own acting abilities. “My anxiety was about, ‘Oh, I’m going to be seen as badly portraying this character,’ rather than later realizing that I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do that,” she said. “So it wasn’t really my ‘fault,’ exactly.” Even viewers have voiced those frustrations to her. “When fans do share that disappointment, they do it in a way where they’re like, ‘We know it wasn’t you. We just wanted more of you,’” she said. “And that’s the same with every character. If only they could’ve been five-hour-long movies, but it would’ve taken probably two years to film each one.”

This likely won’t be a problem for Max’s upcoming Harry Potter series, where each season will reportedly cover an entire book, meaning Ginny and other supporting characters should have more time to shine. Wright will no longer portray her, given that she’s now 32 and pregnant with her first child, but she looks back fondly on filming the eight movies, which lasted when she was 9 years old until she turned 19. “I got this amazing look into the film world,” she told PEOPLE in 2021. “I was so interested in not just the role as an actor, but also just all the other incredible things that made the films what they are.”