INTERVIEW: Aaron Bartz on better understanding Draco Malfoy
Photo: From left, Aaron Bartz and Matthew James Thomas square off as Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, respectively. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by BBB with permission.
NEW YORK — Aaron Bartz is currently appearing on Broadway at the Lyric Theatre in the pivotal role of Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. He’s been with the production for a number of years, and this particular character has kept him busy as he attempts to understand the often misunderstood wizard.
“Not to sound cliche, but it’s been super magical,” Bartz said of his Broadway experience in the play. “It’s such a unique show for a lot of reasons, but it’s so rare to have a big spectacle that’s not a musical.”
The actor, who is making his Broadway debut in the show, counts himself as a “slightly more than average” fan of the Harry Potter universe. He has read the books and seen the movies, and he knows a fair bit of trivia about the franchise.
“But now I feel like I know actually less than so many people because so many of the fans that we encounter are the biggest Potterheads in the world,” he said. “A lot of my castmates are super huge fans and know all the tiny, little details that I have no idea about. I think I’m a pretty big fan, but then I get around some of the pros, and I’m not so sure.”
When Bartz first joined the show, as a swing in year two of the production, he was fascinated by the rehearsal process because it had less to do with the acting that’s involved in the play and more to do with the trickery behind the scenes.
“It was largely learning movement, learning counts to the choreography, learning the illusions,” said Bartz, who has also appeared in Hamlet and American Night at Yale Repertory Theatre. “You learn how to scuba dive and fly in the air and shoot fire and do magic, so it was really cool. But it was a lot of work outside the familiar comfort zone.”
Understanding Draco has been one of the most fulfilling parts of his journey with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. He particularly enjoys playing an adult version of a character that is mostly known for being a child and teenager in the books. This means that Bartz and some of his other castmates have a treasure trove of history to pull from for their respective characterizations.
“We have such a rich history of their childhood to drawn on, throughout their whole time at Hogwarts and growing up there, but then in the intervening 19 years, there’s actually been more life lived in those 19 years then the whole time that we knew these characters before,” Bartz said. “So there’s also a really delicious kind of freedom that comes with that. … Also I encountered this play shortly after becoming a father myself, so I re-encountered this world through that lens and particularly these characters I knew as children who are now adults and have children of their own. So I came to Draco in fatherhood in a way. We kind of met in adulthood through fatherhood, and I was able to bring a lot of myself to that aspect of him, which was so easy for me to understand because Draco, he grew up a very lonely guy. And even as an adult not a lot of people were interested in being around him.”
In the show, Draco does enjoy the company of his wife and son; in fact, family is his entire world. But he’s also not having the most pleasant of times because his wife, Astoria, has fallen ill, and his son, Scorpius, is on a dangerous, time-adjusting quest.
“Scorpius is getting into all kinds of trouble and going missing and messing with time, and so the desire to be the best father he could really be resonated with me strongly,” he said. “So that, in combination with everything I knew of him from the novels and from Tom Felton’s iconic performance in the films, really helped me do something. I didn’t feel like I needed to do an impression of someone that we already knew. Maybe some of the actors who play the characters that we know who are already adults in the novels, there’s a little bit more of an expectation on them I think to do an imitation or an homage. … So I love being able to play an adult version of someone who we only knew as a child.”
Draco, who actually will be played by Felton himself later this year, is a difficult person to like, and Bartz has his own interpretation on why that’s the case. Ultimately it comes down to the old nurture vs. nature debate. The actor points to a little-known feature of Draco that may help explain the character.
“Draco’s wand has a unicorn hair core, and I don’t think that’s an accident,” he said. “It’s a metaphor that outside he’s kind of harsh, unapproachable, not very likable necessarily, but inside at his core he’s a good person. And I feel like Draco is like the bizarro Harry where Harry has this tiny shred of darkness in him. He has literally a piece of Voldemort’s soul, a piece of the devil inside of him. Meanwhile every influence in his life and every person around him is pushing him toward good and toward the light, and Draco I see as the opposite. He has this light deep within him, but every influence in his life is pushing him down to the dark and pulling him to this evil thing.”
Bartz added: “I mean it’s really, really nuts circumstances for Draco, but I think Astoria, his eventual wife, was one of maybe the only people ever who could see past that to who he really was. And I think that she saves him in a lot of ways as an adult, and then the story goes that she was sick basically her entire life. And she always knew that she wasn’t going to get to old age, so to speak, so she really wanted us to have a child so Draco would have somebody. As we see in the play, she wanted me to have somebody when she left, and I think that is so beautiful and heartbreaking. But it really makes it easy to understand why this man would go to any length for his child. He’ll do absolutely anything and often does in the show, confronting all kinds of discomfort and the people he’d least like to talk to in the world, but all for his son, which is such a strong theme in the play.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, featuring Aaron Bartz as Draco Malfoy, continues at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
