James Phelps, who played Weasley twin Fred opposite his brother, Oliver, who played George, recalled how generous Michael Gambon was with his time in between takes on the pivotal Astronomy Tower scene in 2009’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” While Fred isn’t in that sequence, Phelps shared that in addition to his role, he also worked in the assistant director department, so he was on set, and in between setups, Gambon asked him what his weekend plans were.
“As it happened my brother and I were reading Peter and the Wolf with the Manchester Halle orchestra. ‘Do you have the script with you?’ [he] asked, I did, [and he said,] ‘I’ve done that, let’s go through it and if you like I can give [you] some notes’. So we spent what should have been his downtime going over my weekend gig,” Phelps wrote on X. “It is a memory I’ve always had as one of the highlights of my HP days.”
