J K Rowling Reveals What She Told Alan Rickman About Snape

Alan Rickman once revealed that ‘Harry Potter’ author J K Rowling shared “one tiny, little, left of field piece of information” which shaped his performance as Professor Severus Snape.

But what exactly was it?

Apparently, it helped Rickman to realise that there was more to Snape than a mere textbook villain. But it’s always remained a mystery… until now.

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After the death of Alan Rickman last week, the author herself answered some questions about Rickman’s performance on Twitter… and revealed to one fan exactly what it is that she said to him.

“Will you tell us the piece of information that you told Alan Rickman about Severus Snape?” asked the Harry Potter fan. “Or will that forever be a secret?”

“I told Alan what lies behind the word ‘always’,” she explained.

It may not seem like much, but according to Rickman himself, it helped him piece together the character throughout the ‘Harry potter’ films, and gave his performance far more depth than might have existed otherwise.

“[It] helped me think that he was more complicated and that the story was not going to be as straight down the line as everybody thought,” Alan Rickman told HitFix in 2011. “When I did the first film she’d only written three or four books, so nobody knew where it was really going except her. And it was important for her that I know something, but she only gave me a tiny piece of information which helped me think it was a more ambiguous route.”

“What I knew was he was a human being and not an automaton and I knew there was some sense of protection for Harry or I worked that out,” he said. “It was enough to know, I didn’t know he was a double agent.”

Of course, it turned out that Professor Snape – often considered to be one of the baddies of the ‘Harry Potter’ series – had been looking out for Harry all along… and this was revealed in the final film, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two’.

It was an astounding revelation to those who had assumed the worst all along… and a fitting end to the story of one of ‘Harry potter’s most iconic characters.

Alan Rickman died 14 January at the age of 69.

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Picture Credit: Warner Bros.