When any film series stretches across eight full movies over the span of a decade, there will inevitably be some forced cast shakeups. The most famous one in the “Harry Potter” series is the recasting of Albus Dumbledore between “Chamber of Secrets” and “Prisoner of Azkaban,” with the role going from Richard Harris to Michael Gambon, but there were plenty of smaller changes with the minor child actors that were easy to miss. Case in point: poor Lavender Brown, Ron’s first love, was played by three different actresses across the series.
The character’s first appearance was in “Chamber of Secrets,” where she was played by young Kathleen Cauley, and in “Prisoner of Azkaban” she was played by Jennifer Smith (both seen below). Lavender then pretty much disappeared from Hogwarts in “Goblet of Fire” and “Order of the Phoenix” before returning with a vengeance in “Half-Blood Prince,” this time portrayed by Jessie Cave.
Warner Bros
The actress shake-up was easy not to notice, however, because Lavender was rarely (if ever) addressed by name in her first two movie appearances, so a lot of viewers never even knew this was supposed to be her. Making the shift even less noticeable is how Lavender was a total afterthought in the books up until “Half-Blood Prince,” which was only published after those first three movies already came out. So much of what fans would come to associate with the character did not yet exist when Cauley and Smith were originally cast for the (seemingly very minor) role.
The casting change has since received criticism for how the franchise cast Black actresses for Lavender when she was a minor character, only to switch to a white actress the moment she became a love interest and important to the plot. In the movies’ defense, it wasn’t until “Half-Blood Prince” that author J.K. Rowling clarified that Lavender was white. Then again, Lavender’s race was so irrelevant to her character that there wasn’t much need to stay accurate to the books in that respect. If “Prisoner of Azkaban” could cut the Marauders’ backstory entirely, then surely fans could handle a non-white Lavender.
In defense of Lavender, one of the series’ most hated characters
A lot of “Potter” fans don’t like Lavender, mainly because she’s portrayed as a comically overbearing girlfriend whose nicknames for Ron (“Won-Won”) give fans secondhand embarrassment. More damning is how Lavender is one of the final obstacles getting in the way of the Ron/Hermione romance, and by the time “Half-Blood Prince” came around, fans had been waiting to see that resolved for nearly a decade. People wanted Ron and Hermione together, not Ron and Lavender, and Lavender received the brunt of that frustration.
But as thinly written and unsympathetic as Lavender is in the books and the movies, I’d like to defend her on the grounds that Ron Weasley (especially the film version of Ron Weasley) is a jerk to women, and his treatment of Lavender is a prime example of this. He basically uses her as a practice girlfriend to get some “snogging” experience (as his fight with Ginny in the books put it) before moving on to Hermione, the girl he actually cared about. Lavender’s only crime, besides being annoying, was mistakenly thinking that the boy she liked was genuinely into her and not just using her as a confidence boost.
Of course, before Ron could treat Lavender like garbage, he first had to ruin both Hermione and Padma Partil’s night at the Yule Ball in “Goblet of Fire.” This sequence was perhaps Ron’s worst moment, where he couldn’t process his feelings about Hermione dancing with another man, so he decided to sullenly insult her while ignoring Padma the entire night. His behavior here was especially damning in the movie, which didn’t have time to give Ron many of his redeeming book moments, but it did have time to show him treating both Harry and Hermione like trash.
Basically, Ron is the real villain of the Lavender-Ron-Hermione love triangle, and Lavender (regardless of which actress played her) deserved better. On the bright side, at least the movies bothered with some consistency in the final movies of the series: In both “Deathly Hallows” films, Lavender was still portrayed by Jessie Cave. Sure, that final film killed her off (in a departure from the books, no less), but even that end is still more dignified than the role “Half-Blood Prince” required of her.
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