It’s kind of wild when you think about it, but the kids in the Harry Potter movies’ cast spent much of their upbringing on the set of the eight-film series. You can see the fruits of their labor (soon alongside the Harry Potter TV show as well), but some of their best memories happened when the cameras weren’t rolling. The actors who played the Weasley twins in the movies just shared one funny moment they had with J.K. Rowling that sounds like it freaked them out at the time.
James and Oliver Phelps played Fred and George Weasley in all of the Harry Potter movies from the ages of 14 to 24. As the twins just recalled to The New York Post, there was a lot of “waiting around’ on the sets of the large-scale fantasy films. One time, the brothers got into some real tomfoolery with Rupert Grint in his dressing room when they made a crossbow to use to play darts. As Oliver shared:
We’re lining up this crossbow….just as J.K. Rowling stuck her head around the door to say hello. We’re like ‘hello!’ just as the dart goes into the dartboard. She went, ‘I’ll come back later.’ At the time, we were like, ‘It’s the boss! What are we gonna do?’
This is definitely giving classroom energy, except it took place on the glamorous sets of one of the Harry Potter movies, and the adult the kids were a little scared of was none other than bestselling author, J.K. Rowling. But in the instance of the Phelps twins, what was going on with the crossbow was very much in line with their characters anyway.
As James added, they could simply say they were “trying to channel” the troublemaking Weasley’s, perhaps if the author did accidentally really get caught up in the crossfires of a crossbow.
The Phelps twins reminisced about the on-set memory as the second season of their Harry Potter-themed series, Wizards of Baking, premieres on Food Network and HBO Max this weekend. The show that allows the actors to reunite with the set they grew up on first started last year during the holidays, and it clearly made an impact on fans considering it’s already back for a second round.
When CinemaBlend spoke to the Phelps brothers last year for Wizards Of Baking, they shared what it felt like to return to the set, what they learned from the late Maggie Smith, and their continued close relationship with Bonnie Wright (considering she guest starred on the show). This season, Afshan Azad, who played Padma Patil, and Devon Murray, who played Seamus Finnigan, are joining the show for the first time, along with Warwick Davis coming back as well.
You can check it out when Wizards of Baking premieres on November 2, and look forward to new versions of Fred and George Weasley when the Harry Potter series premieres in 2026.
