Rupert Grint just confirmed a longstanding “Harry Potter” urban legend

We’ve heard some fun behind-the-scenes stories about life on the Harry Potter sets (Alan Rickman pranking Daniel Radcliffe with a fart machine, anyone?), but this is one of our favorites to date.

Let’s go back to the early 2000s, on the set of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The story goes that when Alfonso Cuarón joined the project the film’s director, he gave Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson an assignment of sorts. They were instructed to write an essay on their characters Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.

As the legend of the essay assignment goes, one of the actors turned in 16 pages, another turned in a single page, and the third didn’t write the essay at all. You can probably guess which actor did which. (Emma, Daniel, Rupert, in that order.) The Huffington Post recently spoke with Rupert and decided to clear things up once and for all, so they asked the actor if the story was true.

“Yeah. That is true, yeah,” said Rupert, laughing.

Remember, at that point the actors had only played their roles for two (of eight) movies. In real life, they truly didn’t know the future of their characters: When Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the film) was released in 2004, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the last book that had been published.

Nobody (except for J.K. Rowling) had an end story to work towards yet. The three actors were still figuring out who their characters were, and details of their futures were up in the air. So Rupert never quite found the time to complete his assignment. Not without good reason, though — in addition to acting in Harry Potter, he was preparing to take standardized high school tests (which Daniel and Emma, who are two years younger than Rupert, didn’t have to worry about yet).

“It’s quite Ron-ish not to do it,” the actor continued. “I think [Cuarón] kind of appreciated that.”

It sounds like Rupert had a pretty good handle on Ron after all. Life imitating art at its finest, am I right?

(Images via Warner Bros.)