When James and Oliver Phelps visited Copenhagen on November 12^th, 2010, it was in order to walk the red carpet at the Danish "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 1" gala premiere where no mortals were allowed, only 1,100 specially invited guests. After posing for photographers in the Imperial Cinema lobby, the twins had a long, loud welcome inside the cinema. They had to do a little Q&A on stage before the film started, but as the MC was very long-winded in asking his questions, I’ve trimmed them down a bit here. James Phelps opened the Q&A by telling about the World Premiere of the film in London the day before:

JP: The premiere last night was mental. It really was so LOUD that I’m still deaf from it. I was getting over it until we walked in here today and you guys are just as loud as London. It’s incredible so thank you very much.

Q: How has it been growing up on the Harry Potter set?

OP: It’s been really cool being able to see these sets week in and week out when we were filming. And they are huge. The Great Hall is probably as wide as this cinema and about five times as long. It was really cool to keep going on to those sets.

Q: You have a lot of spare time on set. Do you do any jokes and pranks with the people there? Above the belt, please?

OP: I’ll let James tell you this one.

JP: There are some we can’t say, obviously, for the younger audience, and some for legal reasons, ha-ha, no, but there’s one actually… When we’re on location we’re all in trailers and every trailer has the same TV so we went into Rupert’s trailer with the remotes from our TVs in our trailers and we kind of got him thinking that he was operating his TV with his body movements. So when he bent down, the volume went up. And we said, "Stamp your feet!" and he did that and the channels went up and down and we must have had him going for about five or ten minutes, him saying, "I’m actually doing this! Watch!" It’s the oldest trick in the book, but I definitely recommend it if you want to snitch someone up.

Q: What’s the best memory from Harry Potter that you’ll take with you?

JP: My best memory would be nights like tonight. Simply because when we do the movies, there are a hundred/two hundred people in the crew and there’s the cast and that’s it. And then we come to different countries, and you guys, you’re the reason why we do these movies. The memory I’ll take is you guys.

OP: For me personally out of all the movies we have done there have been some great scenes and in The Goblet of Fire, the fourth film, there was the scene with the Yule Ball. That scene will stick with me forever because we had to learn how to dance. Like old fashioned, you know with three step and two step."

JP: "We’re no good!"

OP: "Well, he is not! But things like that will stick with me a lot."

The twins were then handed FCK football jerseys (from FC København), the home jersey for Oliver and the away one for James which they put on straight away. They also got a wide selection of Danish rock music in English. Before the twins left the stage, Oliver Phelps grabbed the microphone in order to say goodbye properly:

OP: "I’d just like to say that we saw the movie last night and it was fantastic. I’d just like to say to you guys, have a great time tonight and enjoy the film."

JP: "Yeah, guys, really enjoy the film and from the bottom of our hearts: thank you so much for making us feel so welcome here and enjoy. Thank you very much."

The twins then left the cinema as they had to do a short interview for Danish TV2 before they had the rest of their time in Copenhagen off, going to the amusement park Tivoli and the huge Hilfinger Denim LOUD concert event at the night club Vega.

@ Lise Lyng Falkenberg, 2010

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