The Bizarre On-Set Injury Harry Potter's Matthew Lewis Kept Hidden
Neville Longbottom went through a lot. In the Harry Potter series, his parents were tortured so horrifically by Death Eaters that they went insane. He was raised by his very scary grandmother. Once he got to Hogwarts, he was bullied by Slytherins for being a dork, and he was so clumsy that he got hurt all the time. He had a toad for a pet, which was teased as deeply uncool. And Neville's injuries and misfortune weren't just confined to the character; even the actor who played him in the movies, Matthew Lewis, suffered a very painful injury during filming. To add insult to injury, the maiming came at the hands (well, wand) of the same witch who tortured Neville's parents, Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter).
During the filming of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the adaptation of the fifth book in J.K. Rowling's fantasy series, Bonham Carter took her character's penchant for cruelty "a bit too literally," leading to an injury that Lewis didn't tell her about until later, because he didn't want to make her feel bad — a very Neville Longbottom move.
"Torture happens, sorry!"
In Order of the Phoenix, during the fight in the Hall of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic, Bellatrix captures Neville and holds him with her wand pointed at his throat and head. Bonham Carter apparently got a little carried away with the threats during filming.
"She was holding me hostage and I remember she turned to the director and said; 'Wouldn't it be quite fitting – and sinister – if she started to really enjoy torturing him?'" Lewis recalled to the New Zealand Herald in 2011. "Then she started playing with her wand, before sticking the tip in my ear, teasingly. There were lots of explosions going off around us and somehow it suddenly went straight into my ear, about an inch!"
"I thought I could brandish the wand like a sort of Q-tip, and clean out his ear. Sort of torture it," Bonham Carter admitted to Entertainment Weekly in 2007. "But unfortunately he moved toward the wand as I was prodding it. And it actually perforated his eardrum. Isn't that horrific? I damaged him!"
Lewis said it "hurt like hell" and he couldn't hear anything for a week. "But it looked great on camera!"
"He's such a nice young man, he didn't admit to me that he actually had some internal bleeding about three days later," Bonham Carter said. Fortunately, though, the injury wasn't permanent. "But there was pain, and blood," she said. "Well, torture happens. Sorry!"
She said she tried to apologize to him, "But he was deaf, so he couldn't hear me." Cue Bellatrix Lestrange's crazed laugh.