When Helena Bonham Carter caused her co-star internal bleeding: “By mistake”
Unless you’re a boxer or possibly a UFC champion, it’s never a good idea to injure someone you work with. You’ll get in trouble and quite probably fired, no matter how frustrating you might find your colleague, and any satisfaction will be wiped out by the fact you won’t have any wages to pay for Netflix. Apparently though, the other exception to this rule is if you’re a famous movie actor, as Helena Bonham Carter can attest to.
Now before anyone starts to worry that we are casting violent aspersions on national treasures, we are simply recounting the time that Bonham Carter went a bit too method with her role as a psychopathic quisling of a Dark Lord by skewering a co-star with a piece of wood.
The incident in question came when Bonham Carter was in the midst of filming the fifth film in the Harry Potter franchise, The Order of the Phoenix, and as the evil Bellatrix Lestrange had to do a close-up wand-fight scene with eventual series hero Neville Longbottom, played by Matthew Lewis.
As she told Entertainment Weekly: “I did something terrible. By mistake, I poked him in his ear. I thought I could brandish the wand like a sort of Q-tip, and clean out his ear. Sort of torture it. But unfortunately, he moved toward the wand as I was prodding it. And it actually perforated his eardrum. Isn’t that horrific? I damaged him! He’s such a nice young man, he didn’t admit to me that he actually had some internal bleeding about three days later.”
Luckily for Bonham Carter, Lewis seemingly forgave her, otherwise, it would have put a massive spanner in the works of one of the world’s biggest movie franchises with another three films left to go, not to mention the fact that Voldemort would have won, given Neville bravely killed his giant snake at the end with the sword of Gryffindor. Sorry, got carried away there.
Bonham Carter was sympathetic to a degree of her co-star’s suffering, adding: “…it wasn’t permanent. But there was pain, and blood. Well, torture happens. Sorry! Oops! I think I took my sadism a bit too literally.” But she did say she apologised to Lewis at the first opportunity, although she added: “He was deaf so he couldn’t hear me.”
Aside from viciously trying to turn young actors into kebabs, Bonham Carter has been busy recently after a fairly quiet period, with several projects in the works, including a third instalment of Netflix’s massively successful Enola Holmes series with Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown.
She’ll also be starring in a TV series called California Avenue alongside Bill Nighy who will take a well-earned break from being in every British comedy movie made in the past 20 years, plus a new film from Michael Collins director Neil Jordan called The Well of Saint Nobody with Jeremy Irons.
The one that most people will be excited about, however, especially the kind of British folk who like to eat hot cross buns on a Sunday afternoon and settle into the sofa and make some kind of comment about how early it gets dark these days, will be another Netflix adaptation, this time an Agatha Christie one called The Seven Dials Mystery. It will see Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman from The Office in a three-episode production in which some posh people in the 1920s get dreadfully upset about some kind of murder that needs solving.
