Evanna Lynch: Harry Potter didn't test me as an actor — now I'm seeking a challenge
Evanna Lync inside the disused swimming pool beneath The Metropole Hotel, which will become the stage for the upcoming production of Pool (No Water) during Cork Midsummer Festival. Picture: Chani Anderson
When most people think of Evanna Lynch, the first thing that will come to their mind is her role of Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films. Lynch was just 15 when she first appeared in Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix as the much-loved Luna, but over 20 years later the character still looms large in her life.
“Harry Potter is the thing everyone wants to talk about. The films are very present in my life still because I don’t make a living on theatre and short films, I pretty much make a living doing Comic Cons. But creatively, for me, that chapter is closed.”
Lynch is 34 now, and still recognisable as Luna, but there is an obvious frustration when she talks about the Harry Potter films — especially given that her screentime across the entire franchise was just 17 minutes and 15 seconds. “That is not very much acting,” she says. “There is a frustrated creative part of me that goes: ‘You haven’t tested me yet. You haven’t seen everything.’”
Creatively speaking, Luna Lovegood is very much in Lynch’s rear-view mirror. And as she takes on a role in the upcoming adaption of Mark Ravenhill’s Pool (No Water) in Cork, it’s clear she’s trying to forge a new, more creatively challenging path.
“I really like intensity in life. A lot of the time on film and in theatre, you’ll have people going, ‘Are you okay? Do you feel safe?’ And I’ve learned something about myself as an actor – I don’t really want to feel safe. I want a little bit of danger. I want to be dangling off the edge of the pool.”
The edginess and uncertainty of Pool (No Water) clearly appeals to Lynch. She leans forward when she’s talking about it. We’re meeting in the team’s rehearsal room. It’s day three of rehearsals and the cast and crew are getting to know each other.
Set in a deserted swimming pool deep underneath The Metropole Hotel, the play is intense and challenging, and heavy on themes of friendship, jealousy, self-doubt and ambition. These are familiar concepts for Lynch, and they’ve sparked deep conversations within the cast.
“We’ve been talking about why some people make it and are ‘chosen’ by the industry, and then you meet lots of other brilliant artists and people, and for some reason they never ‘make it’.”
While Lynch tells me these conversations have been “exhausting at times”, she has taken comfort that others experience “artistic jealousy” too.
“It’s made me realise it’s not just me sitting there googling other actors on IMDB,” she laughs.
The Louth actor has had some ups and downs over the years. In 2023 she tells me she quit acting altogether due in part to her frustration at not securing challenging movie roles and trying to move past the Harry Potter phenomenon. “I thought, this is it, I’m done.”
An avid reader, she says an obsession with romantasy books pushed her back into the world of acting. “I was just like, I want to be one of these characters, and to be honest, that’s how I started acting, you know, it was reading books and going, damn it, I want to be in these worlds.”
Quitting, then coming back to acting, she says, made her realise she wanted this for herself.
Pool (No Water) might be just the project Lynch needs to get her teeth into. It’s quirky and innovative and is tapping into another great love of the actor’s life – dancing.
“Well, I’m a failed dancer. At 19, I auditioned for three dance schools, and they all told me my technique was awful, but I’ve always loved physical expression. I find it really helpful to be able to use your full body, and Luke [Murphy], the choreographer, very much works that way. I think he appreciates the four of us are physically throwing ourselves into it.”
Lynch says she’s worked hard to maintain her flexibility and is loving this physical side to theatre work. “I find it very exhilarating. And Luke really pulls that physicality out of us. He’s there clambering up on the showers and getting covered in grime, and then we start to go, we’ll do that too!”
She admits she’s getting caught up in the energy and athleticism of the role. “Yesterday I fell through a chair. I got a bit over excited, and I tried to jump up on the edge of the pool, and I skinned my knees. I find that exciting. I don’t get enough of that in life.”
This is an actor in her element. Chatting with Lynch it’s obvious that she likes to push her body to its limits. In 2019 she began training in circus skills including the trapeze and aerial skills. These classes are also a key part of her self-care.
Being part of the behemoth that is Harry Potter at such a young age meant she was thrust into an overwhelming world without the mental tools an adult may have. “The thing I sometimes regret about Harry Potter – and you can’t help it because you’re a teenager – is I was so wrapped up in my appearance, what boys thought of me, what the press thought of me, that I wasn’t fully there. Like, I can’t remember certain scenes because I felt so insecure, and I think as you get older, you worry less about yourself, so you’re able to take in the world around you more.”
Lynch is doubling down on that self-care work by taking clown classes in London, where she lives. What began as research for a fiction novel she’s working on, has grown legs, and, well, clown shoes.
“The clown class has been mind-blowing to me. The teacher says the clown delights in failure. So in class, every time
we make a mistake, we have to share it, and I find that mortifying. Most of us try to cover our mistakes, we’re so desperate to make it, or pretend that didn’t hurt me at all, or that didn’t embarrass me. I have a habit in clown class of when I’ve done something embarrassing, I kind of put my eyes down, but my teachers say, ‘share it, share it’. It’s fighting my instincts, but I think it’s important as a performer.”
Now in her mid-thirties, Lynch says she has learned to hold back a little of herself when she’s out in the world. This too is fighting her instincts. “Early on in my career I didn’t realise that you could be a jobbing actor. I thought you had to exploit your own celebrity and create this caricature, and that that was supposed to help your work, but there’s actors who live very privately and with a lot of integrity. As I’ve grown, I see you can keep a lot of yourself back from your work and still work, I didn’t realise that when I was younger.”
Gaining a sense of self-worth is still a work in progress for Lynch. When she was younger, she says she would meet someone and would want “to impress them”.
“I still do this to a certain extent, I kind of lean in, scrape everything out of myself, and kind of say, is that enough?”
There’s an earnestness to Lynch as she talks about what she’s discovered working in showbusiness for over 20 years. She’s surprisingly unguarded when she tells me that although she’s been auditioning for film roles, she’s not getting them. That’s not to say, she’s not working. She has been doing a lot of short films lately, several of which have been critically well received – like Bus Girl (2022), Frog (2025), and Each Coming Night (2025), where she worked with actress, director and writer Dakota Blue Richards.
“[Dakota] started her career by playing Lyra in The Golden Compass when she was 13, so I really feel a kinship with her. We were cast by the same casting director, we didn’t come from acting families, and we have been trying to navigate this business. It’s amazing to just see someone go, “You know what, I’m going to take the reins here’. Working with young women doing that, it’s changing my brain.”
Her brain, she says, is “ticking over” with ideas. She recently narrated the audiobook of the runaway hit Esther Is Now Following You by Dubliner Tanya Sweeney. She loved it. “That book was just so brilliant, so well written, and takes you on such a roller coaster.
“[Audiobook narration] is quite intense. It’s three or four days of recording, but you just put the hours in. Beforehand you have to go through the book with a scalpel. And make sure you’re aware of any accents!”
A previous audiobook narration job saw Lynch scrambling to perfect a Russian accent by watching YouTube videos on her lunch break. “That was an amateur mistake. I hadn’t read the book all the way through,” she cringes.
She’s also working on writing a fiction novel but admits she’s finding the process difficult because she’s applying her acting brain to novel writing.
“As an actor you’re just focusing on one character, and you can go very deep. But with writing, you don’t have that privilege or that time. One of my friends said to me recently ‘you can’t be a method writer’. You see, I was trying to deeply understand the clown character in my book. But I can’t live as a clown.”
We mulled over this idea in the rehearsal room in The Metropole and surmised that maybe this could be Lynch’s way of writing books – her unique selling point perhaps. “In clown class, we’re encouraged to find our personal clown. I don’t know why, but every time I get angry in clown class, the others find it hilarious. I really don’t like it, I feel so out of control. I thought I was writing a clown that was one way, and now it seems I’m writing an angry clown.”
Being in Ireland, in Cork, agrees with Lynch. Though she’s never visited Cork previously (“my dad’s a Limerick man, so we didn’t ever visit Cork!”), after playing the character of Runt in Disco Pigs in 2017, she feels that “spiritually I’ve been here before”.
“I had to research the Cork culture of the 90s, and of course I spent a long time learning the accent.”
Being here now, she’s enjoying bonding with the cast and crew of Pool (No Water). “Because it’s Ireland, we all have friends in common. I’m hearing about what my friends have been up to through them and the choreographer knows a family member of mine as well. So we’ve been climbing all over each other the last few days, and that is bonding for sure.”
Pool (No Water) will run for two weeks this June as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. After that, Lynch says she’d love to turn her hand to the small screen.
“My vision board is saying TV. I’d really love to book a TV role. I’m so enamoured with the idea of working on a character for years and growing with them. Short of that, I think I will try and write this novel.”
- Pool (No Water) by Mark Ravenhill will be performed at the swimming pool at St Patrick’s Quay, underneath the Metropole Hotel, from June 12- 27, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. everymancork.com
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