Tom Felton auditioned for ‘Harry Potter’ without reading the books

Midway through a video interview with Tom Felton about his best-selling memoir, Beyond the Wand, the actor who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies removes the blue-gray baseball cap he’d been wearing backward and begins to tousle his hair. He parts it with his fingertips, pats it with a palm, then spikes it up with a swift flick of his wrist.

Felton’s locks are darker than they were in his Slytherin days — more sand than platinum — but watching him fidget with his trademark coiffure is a bit like watching Daniel Radcliffe clean his glasses. You feel as if you’re getting a peek behind the scenes at Hogwarts.

Beyond the Wand, which debuted at No. 1, is the dishy, chatty result of a decade’s worth of Felton’s scribbling memories of growing up as the youngest of four brothers in Surrey, England (he was known as “runt” and “maggot”), and of the 10 years he spent as a boy wizard. “At a Comic Con, someone would ask me a question and then when I left, my mind would still be racing about that story,” he said. “I’d be compelled to write it down so I don’t forget it. I’m really renowned for losing things, but somehow I’ve managed to keep all these pieces of paper.”

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Which of Felton’s revelations will be most surprising to the population known as Potterheads, who make old-school Beatles fans look like paragons of restraint? “I think maybe how much fun we had?” Felton offered. “That and I suppose the big one will be how I got cast as Draco Malfoy. Essentially they asked me which part of the book I was most excited to see in a film and I panicked, knowing full well that I didn’t know anything about the book. So I just said the same thing as the kid next to me and lied — pretty poorly, I imagine, because Chris Columbus, the director, saw straight through my lie. I think that was the first moment that he thought: Draco.” (For the uninitiated, Draco is a cunning and malevolent soul, albeit a gifted magician.)

Felton writes, “I’d like to tell you that the 12-year-old Tom was inspired to squirrel himself away with some Harry Potter books as a result of being involved with the auditions, but he wasn’t. It helped, I think. The filmmakers weren’t so much looking for actors; they were looking for people who were these characters.”

Spoiler alert: Draco Malfoy isn’t all bad; he just grew up surrounded by evil people. And the man who embodied him has some solid advice for the younger generation: “Don’t lie, kids. It’s a good rule of thumb not to lie.”