Tom Felton's gift is a sneer that looks inherited rather than acquired. Ten years of Draco Malfoy taught a generation what a bully sounds like when he is frightened underneath, and outside Hogwarts the parts have been smaller than the talent.
Fi1m perspective
He comes into a room as if he already owned it. Platinum hair, chin up, the drawl of a boy who has never been told no, and then, when someone stands up to him, a flicker across the face that says the drawl was learned from someone else. That is Tom Felton's Draco Malfoy, from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011), eight films of it. Most child bullies on screen are simply loud. Felton's was afraid, and that is what made him worth watching.
He had been working since he was small, as Peagreen Clock in The Borrowers (1997) and Louis in Anna and the King (1999), before the Potter casting decided what his twenties would be for. He has said he turned up as a snotty kid who looked right, and the films agree with him. Chris Columbus's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), which we thought better built than the first and half an hour too long, asks little of him beyond arriving and being unpleasant. We found we were glad each time he did, because in a film full of children being brave he was the one being nasty, and nastiness is livelier. It is a small pleasure, but it is his. Jason Isaacs, as his father Lucius across the series, gave the sneer a source: the same hair, the same manner, and a good deal more of both.
The year the series ended he was a different sort of cruel in Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), as Dodge Landon, on the human side of a film whose humans our review thought thinly written. We gave that film 80 and barely mentioned him, which is honest. It belongs to Andy Serkis, and the people are there to be got past.
Since then there has been Belle (2013), as James Ashford, which others noticed and we have not reviewed, Ophelia (2018), The Flash (2016–2017) on television, and the stage: 2:22 A Ghost Story (2022), and from November 2025 Draco again in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the first of the original cast to play their part grown up. The criticism is fair. A decade of supporting roles in independent films and television, and no lead of any size.
A man who was a bully at eleven and is playing him again at thirty-eight has either found his part or never been offered another one. We would like to see him cast as someone who has never heard of Hogwarts, for long enough to find out what he does when the sneer is not called for.
Biography
Tom Felton is an English actor. He is best known for portraying Draco Malfoy in the eight Harry Potter films from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011).
Felton began appearing in commercials as a child and made his screen debut in The Borrowers (1997). He appeared in Anna and the King (1999) before his casting in the Harry Potter series. He also played Dodge Landon in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and has appeared in films including Belle (2013) and Ophelia (2018), and on television in The Flash (2014–2017).
