‘I don’t drink, I have never smoked a cigarette in my life and I don’t take drugs. I tried a drink a few years ago, but it just wasn’t my thing so I simply stopped,” says Harry Potter newcomer, Freddie Stroma, 22, matter-of-factly.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has topped the UK box office for the third consecutive week.
The sixth instalment in the wizard series pulls in £2.9 million to beat new releases G-Force and The Taking Of Pelham 123 to the chart summit. Half-Blood Prince has now taken more than £40 million since its UK release last month.
The UK box office top ten in full:
1. (1) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – £2,917,786
2. (-) G-Force – £2,478,524
3. (-) The Taking Of Pelham 123 – £1,784,719
4. (2) The Proposal – £1,489,268
5. (3) Ice Age 3: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs – £1,143,211
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince has set a new record on ticket sales for a midnight showing.
The sixth instalment of the popular series opened in the US last night, while Warner Brothers has reported that it took in $22 million (£13.4 million), according to USA Today.
The box office takings beat the previous record held by last year’s The Dark Knight, which grossed $18.5 million (£11.2 million) during its late night screenings and ultimately became the fourth movie in history to surpass the $1 billion (£609,000 million) mark.
The film also bested Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen’s midnight performances that grossed the picture $16 million (£9.7 million) upon its release.
It was recently reported that the Harry Potter series is expected to become the top-grossing franchise in movie history.
Vital stats: The 22-year-old London native got his start modeling. And, with his dimples and lovely blond locks we imagine that the U.K. native will start winning hearts stateside thanks to his role as Cormac McLaggen in “Harry Potter,” but with all the popularity that comes with the role, Freddie isn’t sure he’s prepared for it.
“Insanely overwhelming. Really, really strange,” he told MTV News at the “Half-Blood Prince” NYC premiere about all the attention he’s getting thanks to the role. “You expect it but nothing can prepare you for it.”
Where you might have already seen him: He’s done some modeling and a few smaller roles in smaller movies like “Lady Godiva” and “Last Flight to Kuwait,” but “Harry Potter” is his real big break. Fittingly, getting the role in “Harry Potter” is a lucky break, so it makes sense that his favorite spell is the liquid luck spell. “I do like the liquid luck,” he said. “That’s pretty good and you don’t have to do much.”
“The scene I love the most is when I am slowly licking my fingers and looking at Hermione,” said the 22-year-old Stroma, who attempts to woo Emma Watson’s character Hermione Granger in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” “I’ve not done that to a girl that I’ve fancied. It’s just so disgusting!”
Unfortunately ladies, he’s off the market. The curly blond, blue-eyed hunk with washboard abs has a girlfriend of two and a half years. They met at school and she’s not in showbiz. He calls her “quite lovely and a supportive girl.” Though female fans are already swooning over him, “She’s not worried about it,” he says. “She knows that I’m not the kind of person that would let it go to my head so there’s nothing really to worry about. We are in a committed relationship.”
Another thing he’s not afraid of? Sweets. “I’ve got a ridiculously sweet tooth,” he says. “I have a lot of candy and I usually pick-n-mix, which is a killer, and Haribo is pretty good as well. But cookies and milk are pretty standard for me. I have a lot of it. I’m quite a bit shocked how much I haven’t grown up in that sense.”
lol I have a big sweet tooth as well. Blue eyes? He has green eyes….
There’s a real Internet buzz about you. How does it feel to have thousands of teenage girls chatting about you on the web before the film was even released?
Very strange…It started before I had even done any filming. To have that many people with opinions about you already was quite a shock at first.
Do you find it intimidating or flattering? And how do you stop it from going to your head?
I find it more intimidating really…I’d like to think that at this stage in life you don’t let things like that bother as much as when you’re younger, but it’s still quite scary having that many people expressing their opinion of you, even if it’s only about a picture.
If you had Harry’s cloak for one day what would you do?
I would go into the offices of the hard-working men and women of London and throughout the day steal/move stationary from their desks. I would probably grab a free lunch while I was there…
Funny how no one cared about him or knew who he was til before the Harry Potter premiere……
Meet 22-year-old Freddie Stroma (pictured right), the latest addition to the Harry Potter cast and a sexy one at that!
Freddie plays the character of Cormac McLaggen in the new film, a brief love interest for Hermione (played by Emma Watson) and contender for the Gryffindor Quidditch team.
Girls – we think he’s going to be a massive hit so clear some space on your bedroom wall for this new Harry Potter hottie! Don’t forget, ‘Twilight’ star Robert Pattinson started out as Cedric Diggory in the fourth Harry Potter film ‘Goblet of Fire’…
Though his co-star Freddie Stroma, who makes his debut as Hogwarts student Cormac McLaggen during the film, doesn’t play a villain, he does serve as a romantic adversary — and all-around arrogant jerk — in “Half-Blood Prince.” “It’s fun to do the comedy stuff and play that slimy, horrible guy and have [Emma Watson's Hermione] feed off it and her kind of just trying to ignore me all the time,” he told us.
But McLaggen eventually receives his comeuppance, when Harry Potter himself convinces the rascal he just swallowed a “dragon’s ball” during a dinner party, making him vomit all over a teacher. “I can’t tell if it actually was [a dragon's ball], or it was Harry saying that just to make me feel bad,” Stroma admitted. “I should probably do some more research on that — find out what I actually ate.”
There was something in this article about wrong facts, I am very sorry about his Freddie, I was told these facts were true but I deleted them ages ago. Does that mean Freddie has visited this site as I’m sure this was the only place stating those facts.
Stroma’s initiation began a little later, and when he walked up the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince red carpet, he celebrated not only his screen debut but also a 2:1 BSc in neuroscience from University College London.
“Education has always been very important to me,” says Stroma, who attended the Hogwarts-style Radley College, a boys’ boarding school in Oxfordshire. “I enjoyed every minute there. It was a very good school with great facilities and great teaching. It was lovely and old-fashioned and they really taught their children how to be gentlemen. I was having so much fun that I rarely got homesick.”
“It’s not like there’s any drunken photographs out there of me, it was just more the fact that they were my photos of friends and family; suddenly, everyone could look at them.”
“There is that Hollywood scene of young stars who seem to get a lot of bad press, but Emma, Dan [Radcliffe] and Rupert [Grint] are such brilliant role models. There’s simply nothing bad to report about them because they’re all really lovely and they are down to earth.
If Stroma’s post-Potter career doesn’t pan out, then he already has a back-up plan: “If my dramatic career doesn’t work out, I will go on to research and find cures for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s and other motor neurone diseases. It’s a very exciting field of research. But I’d like to continue in drama so it wouldn’t be very smart of me if I blew this amazing opportunity with an inappropriate lifestyle.”
Despite getting soaked through and not getting to kiss Rupert Grint last night, heatworld did discover something rather exciting at the Harry Potter premiere…a brand new heartthrob. Delicious Freddie Stroma, who plays Hermione’s admirer Cormac McLaggen in the movie, looks like a younger, more handsome Ryan Phillippe. The blond 22-year-old had a lot of the female fans screaming with excitement last night, and we think he has the potential to gain full heartthrob status. When we told him this, he was rather shy, bless him, saying, “But my character isn’t heartthrob material.” When we told him we could see him being the next Robert Pattinson, he got all embarrassed, but said, “Ooh, possibly yeah. I’d take that, definitely.” Do you think Freddie is a bona-fide Harry Potter hottie? Vote below.