The reason why Hollywood stopped casting Robbie Coltrane
With the news of the sad passing of Robbie Coltrane coming in, the questions around why we hadn’t seen more of him after his iconic role as Hagrid in the Harry Potter film series began to echo. The truth is that producers and directors stopped casting Coltrane in movies, and here are the reasons why.
Coltrane was known to have a no-nonsense attitude when it came to acting; he was a professional in his craft and felt he deserved to be treated as such. However, this attitude could naturally come across as spiky, particularly noted by Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead, who wrote of Coltrane: “The no-nonsense edge is never far from the surface, and it only takes a clumsy question to provoke the sharp end of it.”
In fact, Coltrane was not a fan of the press in sum. Being in a franchise as wildly popular as Harry Potter meant a lot of press responsibilities. He had been known to backtrack on statements after saying them, particularly evident in a one-time confrontation with journalistic chauvinist Piers Morgan.
Coltrane had also, like many star actors, been known to suffer from a penchant for alcohol, which hadn’t been the most attractive prospect to the powers that be in Hollywood. Coltrane once said of his drinking: “Booze is my undoing. I can drink a gallon of beer and not feel the least bit drunk,” and later professed himself to be a “bottle-of-whiskey-a-day-or-nothing-man.”
He had also thought himself to have been typecast following Harry Potter. While Coltrane was proud of his role in the show, having once said: “Think of all the millions of children she’s encouraged to read who’d never have opened a book in their lives, and how good the books were,” he also longed to return to other work, so the world could see that he was more than just Hagrid.
Unfortunately, Coltrane’s films and TV shows post-Potter did not garner the best reviews, say, for instance, in 2013’s Great Expectations, where he played the role of Jaggers. Coltrane had continued, however, working on children’s films such as Brave, so it was no surprise that he was eventually typecast.
Ultimately though, Robbie Coltrane did not lead a Hollywood lifestyle. He was always more in search of a quieter life, a Scottish life, you might say. Coltrane always felt at odds with Hollywood and its excesses. He once said: “I’m certainly not in the ranks of the super rich. I don’t have that kind of money.”
Regardless of why we never saw Coltrane go beyond the heights of Harry Potter and Hagrid, he will forever be missed both within and outside of the film industry.
