This Harry Potter Screenwriter’s Favorite Character Makes Perfect Sense

The “Harry Potter” movie series, which spanned from 2001 to 2011, is remarkably consistent and coherent. They certainly aren’t perfect, but we still got eight movies that all range somewhere from decent to amazing. There is no bad “Harry Potter” film, unless of course you’re counting the “Fantastic Beasts” movieswhich I don’t.

A lot of that consistency comes down to how the franchise kept the same screenwriter for every film except the fifth one. Screenwriter Steve Kloves took a break from the property due to burnout from writing “Goblet of Fire,” and returned with “Half-Blood Prince” to finish those final three films. People love to attribute the storytelling choices in each film to the individual directors, but a lot of the credit should go to Kloves, who put a ton of work into figuring out how to streamline these big complicated books into feature films of reasonable length.

As for what element Kloves gets the most blame for? It has to be his depiction of Hermione and Ron, a portrayal that is seemingly clouded by his favoritism towards Hermione at Ron’s expense. As Kloves explained in a 2016 interview between him and the books’ author, J.K. Rowling, he had told Rowling early into the production that Hermione was his favorite character. This pleasantly surprised Rowling, as before the movies Ron was largely considered the books’ fan-favorite standout.

“(Hermione) had this huge intelligence, but it was really a kind of exasperating, frustrating character in a way that … she was like the girl that bothered you in school but you couldn’t stop thinking about her,” Kloves explained. When Rowling noted that Hermione wasn’t the “easiest person to like,” Kloves noted, “That was what I liked about her … The thing I liked about all the characters were that they were misfits, and almost no one more than she.”

Although Kloves’ fondness for Hermione assuaged a lot of Rowling’s early concerns about the “Harry Potter” movie adaptations, it also drew increasing frustration with book fans. The first warning sign that Hermione would be written as a little too perfect came at the end of the first film when she, Harry, and Ron encounter the Devil’s Snare trap during their quest to retrieve the Philosopher’s Stone. In the source material, Hermione is floundering, and only figures her way out of the situation because Ron reminds her she has a wand she could use to create a fire. In the movie, meanwhile, Hermione is the cool one who tells the boys what exactly what to do.

There’s a reasonable explanation for this: in the original book, Hermione’s big moment to shine is when she solves a logic puzzle a few minutes later. This scene is not very cinematic, however (it’s basically several minutes of Hermione doing math), so it makes sense that a story told in a visual medium would cut that encounter and move her hero moment elsewhere. Still, it created a snowball effect, as the next movie does something even worse.

In the book version of “Chamber of Secrets,” Hermione and Harry (both raised in muggle families) have no idea what the term “mudblood” means when they first hear it used. But as someone from the wizarding world, Ron immediately understands the word is a slur against wizards who have two muggle parents. This creates an interesting scene where Harry and Hermione don’t realize the gravity of the situation, yet Ron does.

In the movie adaptation, on the other hand, Hermione knows exactly what “mudblood” means ahead of time, and she’s the one who explains it to the audience while Ron pukes up slugs in the background due to a misfired hex. It may not seem like a big deal, but it’s yet another example of the “Harry Potter” films taking away one of Ron’s most interesting book moments. These movies have precious little time to characterize everyone, so small things like this quickly add up, creating the impression that Ron’s more useless and uninformed than his book counterpart and, in turn, that Hermione’s smarter and cooler than her book counterpart.

By this point, Ron fans still weren’t that angry about the movies’ changes, as “Chamber of Secrets” was definitely the most Ron-centric of all the books; with Hermione petrified and out of commission for much of the final act, Ron still got plenty of time to shine in that movie. It was only in the next film, “Prisoner of Azkaban,” that the Hermione favoritism became clear. In one of the book’s best scenes, a badly-injured Ron still has the guts to tell Sirius Black (who he still believes is a twisted murder), “If you want to kill Harry, you’ll have to kill us too!” In the movie, the line’s handed over to Hermione.

“Prisoner of Azkaban” also changes a fun scene in the book where Ron defends Hermione from Professor Snape’s abuse. When book Snape calls Hermione an “insufferable know-it-all,” book Ron risks detention by snapping at Snape and calling him a bad teacher. When movie Snape (Alan Rickman) calls Hermione the same thing, Ron cruelly responds, “He’s got a point, you know.”

In defense of this movie, this is the one “Harry Potter” story where letting Hermione take center stage makes perfect sense. “Chamber of Secrets” and “Prisoner of Azkaban” are basically mirrors of each other. The former is when Ron is struggling all year with his broken wand and gets a triumphant final act where he proves his value as Harry’s friend; the latter is when Hermione is struggling all year with her intense class schedule and gets a triumphant final act proving her value as Harry’s friend. Hermione getting petrified in “Chamber of Secrets” serves the same narrative function as Ron breaking his leg in “Azkaban,” in that it creates an easy excuse to sideline one of Harry’s friends so that the other friend can get their time to shine.

“Azkaban” is very much Hermione’s book, so it makes sense that a movie adaptation with its limited time would sideline Ron to focus more on Hermione’s arc (with all the fun time-travel hijinks involved) as much justice as possible. If this had been the end of the Hermione favoritism, no one would’ve complained, but there were still five more movies to go…

“Goblet of Fire” is Ron’s worst movie in that it features two of his least likable storylines: his beef with Harry getting chosen for the Triwizard Tournament and his beef with Hermione for dating Viktor Krum. Ron’s a total jerk in both of these subplots, but the “Goblet of Fire” movie adaptation doesn’t have time to properly delve into why he’s acting this way. The result was that book fans now had four movies in a row where Ron was either underwritten or portrayed negatively, and that certainly took a toll.

Klives did seem to be at least somewhat aware of this, and that’s reflected in his ’16 interview with Rowling. “Ron grew much stronger in the scripts for the last three movies,” he explained. “His family and being from a wizard family gives him an edge over both Harry and Hermione at a certain point and his instincts are sharper than theirs.” He also noted that Rupert Grint was an “underrated” actor.

The statement frustrated a lot of fans, who felt like the appropriate time for Kloves to have had such a realization would’ve been back when he was writing the early movies, not the final three. By the time the trio reached their sixth year at Hogwarts, the advantage Ron had as a wizarding world native was nowhere near as large as it was in their first year, when Harry and Hermione were still getting used to everything. Not to mention, Grint was the strongest of the three central actors in those first few movies; sure, Daniel Radcliffe has since surpassed the others in his (very surprising and varied) adult careerbut it was Grint who seemed most on top of things from day one.

While I think it’s fair to say that Ron was written more charitably by Kloves in the final few movies, it’s also fair to say it was too little too late. The narrative of clown car Ron and genius saint Hermione had long been established, and there was no time left for Kloves to fix that. But hey, perhaps the upcoming “Harry Potter” reboot series will finally give the begruding Ron fans their due.