There is a passage in Harry Potter that drove an actor crazy. He claims that author JK Rowling deliberately included the sentence to annoy him.
Which actor is it about? We’re talking about Stephen Fry, who, in addition to his work as an actor, is also very well known as a speaker in the English-speaking world. His audio books for all Harry Potter volumes are particularly popular.
He reads the extensive volumes with his pleasant voice and breathes life into the various characters. However, as he told a panel at the Hay Festival in 2019, there was one passage in the text that caused him some difficulty.
It was just three simple words that the experienced speaker refused to say.
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“Harry pocketed it.”
What position is it about? Stephen Fry initially had no problems recording the first volumes of Harry Potter. That’s not surprising, after all it wasn’t the first audio book he read. However, when he had to say the three words “Harry pocketed it,” the problems began.
Fry had great difficulty saying the three words neatly in a row. Individually they weren’t a problem, but together they became a tongue twister.
The actor asked to postpone the sentence until later and called Harry Potter creator JK Rowling during the break. He narrated the incident and asked for the passage to be changed. His suggestion was to simply say “Harry put it in his pocket.”
But according to Stephen Fry, Rowling was strictly against it because she didn’t accept any differences between the original and the audio book. So the actor had no choice but to keep trying. Finally, this position was also successful. However, things are different with the films, which have definitely made changes.
How did the story end? As Stephen Fry tells it, Rowling repeatedly used the phrase “pocketed it” in subsequent books to annoy him. Even though she knew it was a tongue twister for him, she didn’t change those parts.
What does Rowling say about this? The writer contradicts Fry’s assumption that she intentionally used the passage in further books. On x.com she says that the anecdote is nice, but it didn’t happen exactly that way, and the sentence doesn’t appear in all parts. In fact, he seems to be missing from Volume 3 and Volume 7, as a compilation on YouTube shows.
Even if the two contradict each other here, it is still an amusing anecdote from the world of Harry Potter. Stephen Fry nevertheless successfully recorded the remaining volumes and enjoys great popularity among English listeners. Did you already know: The Harry Potter films changed an important detail – only to contradict themselves several times