Harry Potter director reveals his one regret about Hagrid that we’ve all been wondering
Recently, Entertainment Weeklyshared a podcast where they interviewed Harry Potter director Chris Columbus about the goings on on the set of what are obviously some of our most beloved movies. Some of the stories he told gave us some serious retrospective FOMO — basketball with Dumbledore, STOP — and some of them just brought aspects of the movie to our attention that we’d never noticed before (like Hermione’s FAKE TEETH at the end of the first movie.) Others still were a little surprising…
Such as the fact that Chris Columbus regrets not making giant Hagrid even GIANT-er.
We thought Hagrid looks pretty huge in the movie as is (he’s only half giant, after all — and word to the wise, DO NOT think about how Hagrid was conceived, you’ll lose a lot of peace of mind over that conundrum) but apparently Chris Columbus regrets not giving him a more substantial (literally) presence.
“I always thought Hagrid should be a little bigger. Believe it or not, we didn’t have the resources or the money to actually create a CGI version of Hagrid for the first couple of films, so we had a rugby player in a gigantic Hagrid suit who worked in the wide shots for us. He was actually walking there with the kids, and then we did forced perspective sets for Robbie (Coltrane) and created an image of Robbie being much bigger than he was, but I always thought Hagrid should be about two feet taller and about 100 pounds heavier.
Since Hagrid already makes the students look like tiny, tiny magical babies next to him, we’re having a little trouble envisioning him being TWO WHOLE FEET taller. Like, that’s a big difference. Although, that only means there would’ve been more to love… and we’re okay with that.