Coltrane Talks Harry Potter and Ocean's Twelve

By James Wray Aug 2, 2004, 3:12 GMT

Robbie Coltrane plays Hagrid in the Potter series

I ask whether he will sign on for the final three films. “I don’t know. I really don’t know what the circumstances will be for the last three. I don’t know if I should be saying this, although if anyone has got any brains they’ll have worked it out, but if Jo Rowling hasn’t finished books six and seven within the next two years, the kids we’ve got at the moment will be too old to play the parts. And they may not even want to.

So it depends on the variables. In some ways I would rather get on with something else, but I don’t want to say that because it sounds so fucking ungrateful.”

He pauses, and cocks his head like an owl listening for a mouse in a cornfield. He has heard a motorbike zoom past outside and is enjoying the sound of the engine.

“So, no, I don’t know if I’m going to do any more,” he continues. “They will, of course, to enchant me back, offer me frightening amounts of money.”

“And is that hard to resist?” I ask.

“Of course it is. I’ve got two young kids. I don’t know what the future holds.”

In Ocean’s 12, he plays a “crime guru” called Matsui, who tests Matt Damon’s character to see whether he is ready for more responsibility. “The next day, the producer Jerry Weintraub said to me, ‘I’ve seen the scene. It’s very, very, very funny, Robbie. I’m gonna give you a treat. What do you wanna do on your day off?’ I said, ‘Well, I suppose I could go and shag a lot of women dressed in leather.’

He says, ‘That’s a possibility.’ ‘Or,’ I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go round Amsterdam, on all the wee canals you never see, on an old boat.’ He said, ‘That will happen.’ So the next day, nine o’clock in the morning, a 1917 motor launch turns up. I step out of the hotel on to the boat and spend two hours going round all these tiny canals. Did you know that Amsterdam is mainly below sea level? I was astonished. These fucking great barricades hold the sea back.”

Anyway, the rest of the interview about Coltrane himself is actually far more interesting, have a read here.