New Draco Malfoy Talks “Wonderful” Harry Potter in First Ever Interview

14-year-old British actor Lox Pratt has a lot of big projects coming up. Very soon, you’ll be able to see him in the new BBC adaptation of William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies. And after that, he will appear in HBO’s hotly anticipated Harry Potter TV show, playing Draco Malfoy.

The two roles have more in common than you might think. Lord of the Flies is about a group of British schoolboys who are stranded on an uninhabited island. With no adult supervision, some of them devolve into savagery, with Pratt’s character Jack leading the charge. Meanwhile, Draco Malfoy is the smarmy son of the imperious Lucius Malfoy (Johnny Flynn), and he butts heads with Harry Potter during pretty much the whole of their stay at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Pratt is barely a year into his career as an actor, and it seems like he’s already specializing in playing antagonists. “Maybe, I don’t know, I’m getting a little bit typecast!” Pratt told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I like to think I’m in a good position. It’s better than being stuck [as] the nice guy the entire time, isn’t it?”

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Pratt doesn’t go into detail on what filming the Harry Potter show is like, but does have wonderful things to say about the experience as a whole. “The set as a whole is absolutely brilliant,” he said. “I feel like I can’t compare it to Flies in any way because it’s just so different. It’s literally apples and oranges [and] so different from running around Malaysia with your shirt off! But it’s great. The vibe on set is amazing. Johnny Flynn’s wonderful. He’s a really wonderful man. I think we work pretty well as a duo onscreen, or I like to think we do. But he’s a lovely guy and he’s got a lot of aura.”

You’d have to have a lot of aura to play Lucius Malfoy. In the Harry Potter movies, Lucius was played by Jason Isaacs, who had a condescending sneer for the ages. As for Draco Malfoy, he was played in the movies by Tom Felton. Apart from one person (that we know about), the HBO show will have a whole new cast, including new young actors in the roles of Harry (Dominic McLaughlin), Ron (Alastair Stout), and Hermione (Arabella Stanton), the central trio of the story. The Harry Potter show will also star the likes of John Lithgow (Professor Dumbledore), Nick Frost (Hagrid), and Janet McTeer (Professor McGonagall), among many others. And there are still plenty of characters yet to cast.

First, ‘Lord of the Flies.’ Then ‘Harry Potter.’ Then the World.

Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger, and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley

If the new Harry Potter show is a hit, it could turn Lox Pratt and his castmates into stars the way the movies did for the likes of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, although it sounds like Pratt is determined to make a name for himself regardless. “I want to write, I want to direct, I just want to be in the industry as much as I can and learn,” he said. “That’s my main thing. I want to learn everything and I want to shadow people on Potter.” Pratt even gave a self-penned screenplay to Jack Thorne, who wrote the Lord of the Flies show. “It needs a bit of tweaking. I don’t know if it will happen, but it’s got legs.”

For now, Pratt is just bowled over that he’s gotten to be in multiple big series so close in time: “I don’t know how I did that — in the space of two years, I pulled off these two things. I was like, ‘Wow.’ I mean, [I’m] blessed, but also, you need to put in the work and make them extraordinary.”

It’ll be a while before we’re watching Pratt perform in Harry Potter; the show has a tentative release window of early 2027. But the new Lord of the Flies show premieres on Sunday, February 8, right around the corner. To hear Pratt tell it, the show will try to get into Jack’s head and explain why he becomes so brutal. “People often see it as a descent into savagery, and I think it is, but there’s a lot more going on,” Pratt said. “He has to accept a lot of his flaws. There’s this pile that keeps getting added to, [of] shame and different things.”