The Biggest Differences In Ginny Weasley Between The Books & Movies

I completely understand that adapting a beloved book series for the big screen is a difficult and precarious task, especially when you’re talking about the “Harry Potter” novels written by Joanne Kathleen Rowling (or J.K. Rowling, as she prefers to be styled). The seven books, which span a couple thousand pages and covers the life of the boy wizard named Harry Potter (played in the film franchise by Daniel Radcliffe), are massive and chock-full of lore, building the Wizarding World brick by brick and introducing everything from wand types to wizarding currency to magical slang. When it comes to the film adaptations, which were helmed by a collection of directors (Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and David Yates for the final four installments), the creative team did a pretty phenomenal job for the most part … but one huge issue is the character of Ginny Weasley, played by Bonnie Wright.

I don’t want to speak ill of Wright, but the bottom line here is that the young actor — who appears in all eight movies as Ginny, the youngest member of the sprawling, red-headed Weasley family — did the best she possibly could with obviously limited material. The worst part of this is that in the books, Ginny is extremely awesome, so allow me to explain some key differences … and why the big-screen version of Ginny got seriously shafted.

When we first meet Ginny in the original books, her brother Ron (Rupert Grint), the family’s youngest boy and Harry’s best friend, warns Harry that Ginny has developed a bit on a crush on “The Boy Who Lived,” as Harry is often called due to his defeat of the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) when he was just a baby. In the second installment, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” Ginny is painfully shy (in both the film and book versions!), particularly when it comes to Harry. As it happens, she’s also hiding an enormous secret … which is that she’s been corresponding with the memory of Voldemort’s younger self, Tom Riddle, through an enchanted diary all year and is the person responsible for opening the legendary Chamber of Secrets (through his possession).

After Harry rescues Ginny from the Chamber in the books, she lightens up quite a lot, making jokes around him whenever he spends time with the Weasley family (which he does often) and by the time the fifth novel rolls around, she rules. She starts calling Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poésy) “Phlegm” after Fleur starts dating the oldest Weasley son Bill (Domhnall Gleeson), is the one who comes up with the name “Dumbledore’s Army” just to piss off the Ministry of Magic, and also keeps people in check. In the book “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” when Harry is fretting that he’s being possessed by Voldemort and won’t speak to anyone as a result, Ginny fires back.

“Well, that was a bit stupid of you,” as Ginny angrily says to Harry in that book, “seeing as you don’t know anyone but me who’s been possessed by You-Know-Who, and I can tell you how it feels.” In the next book, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” after Harry and Ginny start dating (more on that in a second), she says to Harry, Ron, and Hermione (Emma Watson) as they’re all in the Gryffindor common room, “Three Dementor attacks in a week, and all Romilda Vane does is ask me if it’s true you’ve got a Hippogriff tattooed across your chest.” (She says she claimed it was a Hungarian Horntail since it’s “much more macho,” and also jokes that she said Ron has a Pygmy Puff tattoo in a mystery location.)

It’s fair to say that, in the “Harry Potter” films, Bonnie Wright and Daniel Radcliffe just have bad chemistry. (It’s not the fault of the actors; these things happen.) It’s a crying shame, though, because in the books, Harry and Ginny have a pretty intense relationship … beginning with Harry’s surprising feelings for his friend’s sister that develop in “Half-Blood Prince.” When he and Ron encounter Ginny kissing her boyfriend Dean Thomas (played in the films by Alfred Enoch) and Ron has a tantrum about it, Harry is distracted: “It was as though something large and scaly erupted into life in Harry’s stomach, clawing at his insides: Hot blood seemed to flood his brain, so that all thought was extinguished, replaced by a savage urge to jinx Dean into a jelly.” Later, as he and Ron head to bed in their dormitory, Harry frets about the fact that he has a crush on his best friend’s sister, telling himself that she’s “out-of-bounds” to protect his friendship with Ron.

This monster motif continues on and on throughout the book (look, nobody ever said Jo Rowling was the most subtle writer in town), building to a point where, after Ginny plays in Harry’s stead in a pivotal Quidditch match, they see each other in the Gryffindor common room. To quote a key moment from the novel: “Harry looked around; there was Ginny running towards him; she had a hard, blazing look in her face as she threw her arms around him. And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry kissed her.” What’s my point here? Well, do you remember that weird, lackluster kiss between Harry and Ginny that happens in the “Half-Blood Prince” movie in the Room of Requirement that makes no sense in the narrative? Wouldn’t it have been way better to see a kiss that’s so great that Harry thinks that it took “half an hour — or possibly several sunlit days?” Yes. We all know it would have been better.

About that Quidditch match — in the “Half-Blood Prince” book, after Harry ends up in detention during an important Quidditch match, Ginny must take up her own broomstick and replace him as the Seeker. (As people have pointed out time and time again, the Seeker, whose job it is to catch the Golden Snitch worth a truly wild number of points, is basically the only Quidditch player that matters.) Ginny’s older twin brothers Fred and George Weasley, played on-screen by real twins James and Oliver Phelps, wonder out loud — in the Gryffindor common room — how Ginny became such a capable Quidditch player. As it turns out, there’s an answer: “‘She’s been breaking into your broom shed in the garden since the age of six and taking each of your brooms out in turn when you weren’t looking,’ said Hermione from behind her tottering pile of Ancient Rune books.'”

Fred and George are both surprised and impressed by this revelation, and Ginny’s Quidditch career doesn’t slow down. After Harry returns to the team, Ginny becomes a Chaser — her preferred position — and canonically, Ginny goes on to play for the professional team The Holyhead Harpies as an adult before becoming a Quidditch correspondent for the wizarding newspaper The Daily Prophet. The movies gloss over Ginny’s Quidditch career as it pertains to Harry’s ban, but we don’t get to see her in action, and we never get that awesome reveal about her stealing broomsticks to train in secret.

Growing up with six older brothers will make basically anyone toughen up a bit, and while Ginny is certainly a warm and supportive source of comfort for Harry throughout the later “Harry Potter” novels, she’s also pretty freakin’ resilient. When Harry wants to talk to his godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman in the movies) while Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton in the films) is terrorizing Hogwarts in the “Order of the Phoenix” book, but needs to use her fire to do so because it’s the only one that’s not under surveillance, it’s Ginny that helps Harry figure out he can pull this daring mission off. To quote the relevant passage from the book: “‘The thing about growing up with Fred and George,’ said Ginny thoughtfully, ‘is that you sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.'”

Beyond that, Ginny fights back against her brothers whenever they cross her. In the “Half-Blood Prince” book, when Fred suggests that Ginny might be dating too many boys, Harry watches as she shuts him down immediately. (“Ginny turned to look at him, her hands on her hips. There was such a Mrs Weasley-ish glare on her face that Harry was surprised Fred didn’t recoil.”) Then, when Ron and Harry catch Ginny and Dean, as they all put it, “snogging,” and Ron criticizes her, Ginny fires back at her brother, “It’s only you who acts like it’s disgusting, Ron, and that’s because you’ve got about as much experience as a twelve-year-old!” (Sick burn, honestly.)

Not only that, but Ginny’s spell of choice in the books is also the Bat-Bogey Hex, which her brothers note is excellent. By comparison, the only evidence of Ginny’s true magical fortitude we get in the “Harry Potter” films comes when she casts a very powerful “Reducto” spell and impresses everyone. None of this other stuff makes it into the movies either, which is a damn shame.

To that point, Ginny has a full life in the books that has nothing to do with Harry himself … and while I do understand that the “Harry Potter” film franchise isn’t called “Ginny Weasley,” it feels like the character was ultimately whittled down so severely that she barely exists. While Harry is grappling over what to do about his enormous crush on Ginny and how it would affect his friendship with Ron in the novels, he muses about how he could possibly get Ginny alone and maybe ask her out, only to realize a major issue: “And to complicate matters, he had the nagging worry that if he didn’t do it, somebody else was sure to ask Ginny out soon: He and Ron were at least agreed on the fact that she was too popular for her own good.”

Beyond that, Hermione and Ginny have their own independent relationship in the books; how hard would it have been to simply build that into the movie adaptations by featuring shots of Hermione and Ginny spending time together amidst a whole bunch of boys? In fact, it’s Hermione who encourages Ginny to get her own life and stop pining over Harry, which leads to her major character development. As Ginny tells Harry in the “Half-Blood Prince” book, Hermione is behind Ginny’s personal reinvention:

“‘I never really gave up on you,’ she said. ‘Not really. I always hoped … Hermione told me to get on with life, maybe go out with some other people, relax a bit around you, because I never used to be able to talk if you were in the room, remember? And she thought you might take a bit more notice if I was a bit more — myself.'” 

Ginny is a well-rounded character who happens to be a good fit for Harry in the books rather than just a girl he randomly kisses with no feeling, like in the movies, and small adjustments could have been made to communicate this.

In “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” (the 2010 movie that helped establish the two-part theatrical release model later embraced by projects like “Wicked”), Ginny and Harry share a strange, fraught moment before Bill and Fleur’s wedding where they almost kiss before they’re interrupted by George. This is actually an amalgamation of two different moments. At the end of the novel version of “Half-Blood Prince,” Harry tells Ginny that they have to part ways so that he, Ron, and Hermione can hunt for Horcruxes (meaning, pieces of Voldemort’s soul that must be destroyed before he can be killed). Ginny, in rare form, responds, “It’s for some stupid noble reason, isn’t it?” Despite the fact that Ginny says she doesn’t care that Voldemort could use her as bait to trap Harry, even killing her in the process, Harry insists, and Ginny understands.

Then, before Bill and Fleur’s wedding in the book version of “Deathly Hallows,” Ginny wants to give Harry a “birthday gift” to remember her by, meaning a kiss … and though they’re interrupted by Ron, Ginny shows real agency in this moment instead of, apparently, kissing Harry as a weird fluke in the film version. Ginny Weasley is cool, but if you’ve only seen the “Harry Potter” movies, you might not know that.

The “Harry Potter” films are streaming on Peacock now.