Rupert Grint reveals the life of a child actor gone right

Rupert Grint is a former child actor who doesn’t act like a former child actor. So says M. Night Shyamalan, director of Knock at the Cabin, Grint’s first feature film project in eight years.

“I told him this: He shouldn’t exist,” Shyamalan Bustle said in an interview published Monday. “A child actor, part of an almost religious IP.”

The red-haired tween-then-teen who played Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter franchise has a sense of how rare his story could be.

“I always felt like there was this expectation for us to break free and follow the child star stereotype,” Grint said in the interview. “It’s always been something to fight against.”

According to Shyamalan – also executive producer and director of four episodes of Grint’s AppleTV+ series Servant – the fight is going well.

“He’s nice to everyone,” says the filmmaker. “He’s always on time. He’s super professional. It comes to him easily. He’s just an exceptional person in every way. He really turned out to be a wonderful actor.”

So instead of a drug problem, a mental health crisis, and a criminal record, Grint has a wife, a 2-year-old daughter, and a nifty array of hobbies that he expects to keep him busy outside of the “one or two” acting projects he tells GQ UK said he hopes to do it every year.

But after the “Harry Potter” actors wrapped up work on the final films in the franchise, Grint initially had no plan as to what to do next.

“I couldn’t see any obvious next step, so I just did everything in front of me,” he told GQ UK in another interview published on Monday. “I just wanted to get the passion back.”

(That was after he also took some rest, having told The Times in 2010, “The last few movies have been pretty tough. It’s been over a year in production. It’s been really busy.”)

Former co-star Alan Rickman, who died of cancer in 2016, encouraged him to try theatre, which he did in London’s West End in 2013. There he learned the “always on time,” which Shyamalan praised.

One day, after Grint made the entire cast wait 10 minutes because he was late for rehearsal, playwright Jez Butterworth took him aside for a lesson.

“He pulled me aside and said, ‘You can’t be late, okay?’ I realized that it couldn’t just be me, me, me, in the sense that I couldn’t just do what I liked. Being just 10 minutes late had a huge impact on everyone. There was pressure that I had seldom felt before.”

He must have liked something about it because in 2014 he was found on Broadway in another show. Then he poked around at random, mostly doing episodic television.

Eventually, Grint ended up in the world of Servant, where he says he got his role “on merit” after auditioning for Shyamalan. The project, now in its fourth season, gave the actor an anchor from which he snagged the role in Knock at the Cabin. Both Shyamalan projects are opportunities for him to show the darkness he says lives within him.

That means he probably won’t stay dark forever.

“I like the idea of ​​doing something light next — like a Christmas movie,” he told Bustle. “I’m happy where I ended up.”

“Knock at the Cabin,” which also stars Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge and Nikki Amuka-Bird, opens Thursday.