Alan Rickman Did Not Say This Quote
Alan Rickman was both an incredible actor and, by all accounts, a pretty damn kind human being. Over the course of his career, he inspired and entertained many, many people, including (but certainly not limited to) millions of Harry Potter fans, myself included.
Personally, his loss has not left my mind for more than a few moments today. Like many other twentysomethings, this man has been a constant presence in my life for most of my life, so of course, for better or for worse, I felt like I knew him.
Beyond Harry Potter, of course, there’s Die Hard, there’s Galaxy Quest, there’s Sense and Sensibility — among so many others. The two non-Potter films that I’ve been wishing I had an easy way to rewatch today are 2006's Snow Cake and 1990’s Truly, Madly, Deeply, two very different movies that each quietly examine the process of grief in their own small, idiosyncratic ways. In the former, Rickman is on the outside looking in on the mourning of someone he barely knew. In the latter, he’s the one who’s being mourned. I could use both of those movies today.
But for some reason, the thing that kept prodding me toward tears this afternoon was not a memory of one of Rickman’s films, was not Ian McKellan’s moving Facebook post, was not Emma Thompson’s tribute to her longtime friend. Instead, it was seeing this photo and quote pop up repeatedly on my Facebook and Twitter feeds:
I wanted to cry not because this moved me, but because I was absolutely positive that Alan Rickman never said it. It felt too pat, too cute, too much like one of the myriad silly things we keep attributing to William Shakespeare. But more importantly, it just didn’t sound like Alan Rickman, because goddamn it haven’t I known Alan Rickman for most of my life?
Flashback to the first Harry Potter movie. When Rickman was cast, only three books had been published. Through Prisoner of Azkaban, we had learned very little that was redeeming about Severus Snape. He was truly cruel to his students, taking particular pleasure in bullying Harry and Neville. He was described as “a thin man with sallow skin, a hooked nose and greasy, shoulder-length black hair” (Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 5). In the American edition of the third book, he was illustrated like this:
If you weren’t paying very close attention, it would not have been a giant leap to see this man as a cartoon.
However, by portraying Severus Snape as a man of complexity and pained humanity, rather than as camp, Alan Rickman helped to legitimize the film adaptations and, by proxy, our love for these books; helped pull our passion out of the realm of the nerdy and ground it firmly in the mainstream. These weren’t just movies about magic: they were movies that understood and respected the depths of feeling that the books aroused in us; movies that, for the most part, prioritized the humanity of their characters above the gloss of their special effects.
Rickman wasn’t alone in this legitimization, of course: looking just to the first film adaptation, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Griffiths, and especially Fiona Shaw also stand out for their layered portrayals of characters who could easily have been mistranslated as cartoons. But Rickman’s particular achievement became clearer the further into the series we progressed, as Snape’s position in the story edged closer to its core.
By the time Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II was released in 2011, the internet was shouting for an Oscar nomination — “All the awards!” — and it’s not difficult to see why: far more than the last book ever did, Rickman made audiences sympathize so strongly for Snape in his final scenes that, for the most part, we managed to forget how terribly this man had verbally and emotionally abused our protagonist for the entire series up to that point.
I can’t think of another example of a single actor’s performance in a non-leading role shifting the collective understanding of a story so profoundly. Even for book fans, there has been a fundamental shift toward sympathy for Severus Snape that I attribute far more to Rickman’s portrayal than to the seventh book’s revelation of his feelings for Lily. Since the release of the final film, “Always” seems to have become the buzzword that tugs Potter heartstrings the easiest, and there has arisen somewhat of a schism between the fans who love Snape — or at least, this romanticized “Always”-Snape — and the fans who try to remind everybody else that he was cruel to Harry for so long. Even J.K. Rowling recently tried to set the record straight:
This is where that rocking chair quote comes in.
Turns out, unsurprisingly, those words were written by a fan about her own experience with the books, taken out of context, attributed to Rickman, and reblogged and retweeted ad nauseum alongside various photos of him. The fan responded to the quote’s surge in popularity today by saying that “it was just something that was personal to me to express how much Harry Potter meant to me. I had no idea that those words would end up meaning so much to so many people.”
And those words have, probably, given a lot of people the feels today, because even though it’s fiction, the world of Harry Potter truly, madly, deeply means something to us, and today we lost one of the giants of that world. If we accept this quote at face value, we get to claim Alan Rickman as one of our own: he wasn’t just an actor, he was a Potter fan himself. He got it. He understood.
This is compounded, of course, by losing Rickman eleven years before he could ever become the 80-year-old in the rocking chair.
But even if that quote powerfully strikes a chord inside of us, I think it’s still important to clarify that Alan Rickman never said it.
One of the many remarkable aspects of Rickman’s career has been his ability to lead a very quiet public life in a culture that demands otherwise, and, as a result, to let his work speak for itself. By putting words in his mouth—by transferring our own feelings about the series onto him — I think we’re doing a disservice, however unintentional, to the actual man who gave us so much.
And the thing is, what the actual man had to say about his experience making the Harry Potter films is, at least to me, much more beautiful than that damned rocking chair quote will ever be.
In 2011, the year of the last movie, Rickman took out an ad in Empire magazine to express his gratitude on his own terms:
Today, as we rewatch his movies and continue to read the tributes from his friends, let’s remember this man — known so well by so many for his distinctive, beautiful voice — by allowing him to speak for himself.
