National Doodle Day, a fundraising event which supports the work of Epilepsy Action, is auctioning several doodles from Harry Potter actors to raise money for the charity. Sean Biggerstaff (Oliver Wood), Brendan Gleeson (Mad-Eye Moody), John Hurt (Ollivander), Adrian Rawlins (James Potter), Fiona Shaw (Mrs. Dursley), Mark Williams (Mr. Weasley), Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley), and composer Patrick Doyle ("Goblet of Fire" soundtrack) have each donated a doodle and you can see their doodles here.

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In honor of Professor Snape's birthday, the Pottermore Insider has revealed a look at one of the upcoming Moments from "Prisoner of Azkaban":

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A very happy birthday to the man who can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even stopper death - Severus Snape! Please join Leaky in wishing a happy birthday to the bravest man Harry ever knew.

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Emma Watson will be featured on the February 2013 issue of Marie Claire UK. This issue became available to purchase on Thursday, January 3. Photos of Emma Watson from the magazine can be seen here. (The cover may be see below). Marie Claire UK reports:

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2012 was the first year in which neither a new Potter novel nor Potter film was released, but that has not slowed us--the mighty fandom--down one bit. In fact, we thrived on a year full of Harry Potter news and excitement. Pottermore kept the fandom feed with new content from J.K. Rowling in its release of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and the first installment Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The release of games (Harry Potter Kinect, and Wonder Book: Book of Spells) and movie collections (The Harry Potter Wizard's Collection, and all of the ultimate editions of the movies are now out) kept us entertained. As well as the fact that now we can all visit the studio where all the magic was made, and shop at the real Platform 9 3/4. With the 15th anniversary of the novel that started it all (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), and the 10th anniversary of the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, it was a year to reflect and enjoy all that the Harry Potter empire has brought--and is still bringing.

This year, we have watched the beloved cast of Harry Potter grow and develop beyond the movie set of their childhood. We proudly saw them thrive in all of their post-Potter projects and endeavors; bringing us more joy and entertainment in their new movies and musical performances. Many awards were nominated and received; Helena Bonham Carter received her CBE in January, and Kenneth Branagh was knighted in November. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows--Part 2 was nominated for many awards (5 Empire awards, and 10 Saturn awards, just to name a few), and received quite a few as well.

Ms. Rowling has kept us on our toes from early on in the year. On February 24, J.K. Rowling announced the publication of her first post-Potter, adult novel. She kept us on the edges of our seats as details of this mysterious new book were slowly released. During this excitement, Ms. Rowling received The Freedom of the City of London Award on May 8th. On April 12, J.K. Rowling launched her new website and released the publication date, few plot details, and the title of her new work. The cover art of Ms. Rowling's new novel was released later this past summer, on July 4th. Ms. Rowling took a break from enticing her fans to make an appearance (with Lord Voldemort) at London's 2012 Summer Olympic Games. The Casual Vacancy was finally released on September 27, 2012. J.K. Rowling was on the promotional road again, and stirring up a whirlwind as she went!

This coming year, we can only expect many more great things from the world of Potter. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is expanding, and opening in new locations. We are looking forward to the release of many more post-Potter movies from our favorite actors, and J.K. Rowling is working on a children's novel and expects to be back on the promotional road soon! We here at Leaky have deeply enjoyed this past year with all of you, and we look forward to the years to come for this thriving fandom. We wish you the best, and a very Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!

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December 27th is here! For those of you following along at home over the years you might know the 27th to be yet another December holiday at Leaky... Melissa Anelli's Birthday! I hope everyone enjoys the day, but most of all I hope Melissa has a great birthday, filled with friends and family and many inches of snow! Everybody go ahead and join in and fill the comments with love and birthday wishes! 

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A new advertisement for Lancôme, featuring Emma Watson, has been released. The advertisement highlights a few new products in Lancôme's new In Love make-up line. This picture can be seen below. NY Daily News reports:

With turquoise-rimmed eyes and bright pink lips, the sleek star shines in the ad, a colorful change from the vampier Lancôme campaigns she’s done in the past.

The British beauty – of “Harry Potter” fame – wears the “Rose Macaron” shade on her lips, “Pommettes d’amor” as blush and eyeliner in “Jade Crush.

The bright-colored Spring 2013 collection hits stores in January.

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Here at Leaky, we hope you had a very merry and magical Christmas yesterday! A post went up yesterday morning, but due to technical difficulties it never seemed to have appeared on the main page. Wishing you all the best and we hope Santa was good to all of you and delivered each of you a Weasley sweater!

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The Pottermore Insider has reported that new exclusive content from J. K. Rowling on the subject of Floo Powder has been added to Pottermore. This content can be found Chapter Four of Chamber of Secrets:

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It has been reported that Emma Watson was to make a cameo in a movie about an apocalypse, This Is The End. The first scene of this movie has been released, and the full movie trailer was expected to make its debut yesterday. A glimpse of Emma Watson can be see in this clip, as she rushes through a door with a shovel in her hand (the still is at the 1:46 marker). The movie is expected to hit theaters June 14, 2013. This Is The End is rated R, consequently the contents of the video below is NOT suitable for fans under the age of 17. Many thanks to Digital Spy for reporting and posting this clip.

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The first seven chapters of "Prisoner of Azkaban" have been added to Pottermore:

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If you have been living under a rock or a similarly YouTube-less planet for the past couple days, you don't know about Project For Awesome, which is basically the best thing to happen on the Internet. Project for Awesome started in late 2007 as a way to use the YouTube algorithm for good: to use the crowd power of YouTube viewers to make sure that videos about charity and good works were bumped to the top of every user's homepage for a day. YouTubers make videos about their favorite charities, whatever they may be, and flood the platform for the day: users then go on commenting sprees and vote those charities up to the top of the charts.

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The Pottermore Insider has announced that the first few chapters of "Prisoner of Azkaban" will be up on Pottermore this Thursday, December 20th.

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As we told you earlier in the week, The Harry Potter Shop at Platform 9 3/4 opened to the public today after Warwick Davis (Professor Flitwick, Griphook) cut the ribbon and opened the shop to the press for a preview on Friday. Leaky was one of the lucky guests invited to have a look around and you can see some of the things inside the shop, its layout and a number of 9 3/4 exclusives in the video below, which also includes a clip of Warwick Davis and the ribbon cutting ceremony.



The shop is small but packed with merchandise, much of it familiar to fans, with items from the Noble Collection such as the locket and Luna's beaded radish earrings, alongside the Harry Potter books and Hogwarts jumpers. Walking in after the very brief ribbon cutting ceremony, it was the 9 3/4 hoodies that immediately caught my eye. Priced at a fairly reasonable £29.99, the hoodies bear a stamp-like print of the platform number and can be seen in the video above.

When asked about his favourite items in the shop, Warwick Davis named the wands but also stressed that he'd like a functioning Deluminator to save him the trouble of turning the lights off at night. The actor further found himself in knots trying to pick between Flitwick and Griphook when he was asked which character he preferred playing and settled on "both of them". You can watch more from the Q&A with Davis in a video to be uploaded soon on our YouTube channel.

The size of the shop makes everything seem smaller, creakier and all-in-all like it quietly crept out of the brickwork without anyone noticing, which, to be fair, it almost did. Those employed to work on and promote the project did a fantastic job about keeping quiet, preventing any half-baked spoiler photographs purely because no one knew it was happening (TLC only found out a couple of days before the launch event).

The date of the opening is, conveniently, a couple of weeks before Christmas Day, and with early opening hours, The Harry Potter Shop is sure to catch commuters as well as the fans who stopped by to take photographs with the giveaway trolley and platform sign just next door. Have any Leaky readers visited the shop yet? If so, let us know what you thought and stay close for more video and some pictures from the event.

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Harry Potter cast-members, officially including the trio (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint) and Helena Bonham Carter thus far, have been reunited to shoot a "mini-film" for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter expansion. The film is set to be shown at the extension being added to the Florida theme park, which will include two new rides (and perhaps The Leaky Cauldron restaurant!). Nothing has been said yet about the California theme park (which is set to open in 2014), or the Japan theme park (expected to be open in 2016). The Sun released an official statement from a "source":

A source confirmed last night: “The cast have really enjoyed getting back together — they are so tight-knit.”

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The Pottermore Insider has updated the site with a hint for things to come on Pottermore. They posted a picture of tea leaves, asking readers to make predictions based on what they see in the cups. Is this a simple test of your skills at Divination? Or a hint that "Prisoner of Azkaban" will be arriving soon on Pottermore? Or is it both?

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In a new (extensive) interview Calgary Herald, Daniel Radcliffe had a long chat about being a grown-up child super-star. There are many draw backs and perks of course, but Radcliffe talks about keeping life relatively normal as he moves on from Harry Potter. Radcliffe also answered questions about his life on the set of Harry Potter, as well as his work on his post-Potter projects (The Woman in Black, Horns, A Young Doctors Notebook, and Kill Your Darlings). The Calgary Herald reports:

LONDON — Daniel Radcliffe bounds in to the hotel room like an eager puppy, all hand shakes and smiles for the assembled publicists, PAs and makeup artists. He is talking excitedly about the “gorgeous blond” he just met in the corridor. She had asked if he could direct her to her room — not so subtly revealing her room number in the process — and he hadn’t been able to assist her.

“But it wouldn’t have worked anyway,” he says, “because she was about 6-foot 2.” He’s joking, he has a girlfriend, but the point he makes about his height is an intriguing one. He is 5-foot 5.

This is the first thing you notice about him, but luckily it is not the first thing the camera notices.

That he qualifies his comment about the photographers by saying that they won’t necessarily be waiting for him is telling. His modesty, self-deprecation and good manners are instantly apparent, and a great credit to his parents who managed to forge a well-rounded and functional personality out of potentially dysfunctional circumstances.
On the morning I meet him, the papers are all carrying stories about the film he starred in earlier this year: The Woman in Black, which has become the highest-grossing British horror movie in 20 years, taking more than $127 million around the world. The stories, which he hasn’t had a chance to see, are about how The Woman in Black has become the most complained about film of the year, because some parents took their young children to it.

That film was something of a rite of passage for Radcliffe, an emphatic signal that he had moved on from Harry Potter.

“There was a part of me in some scenes that was slightly scared of my own face, because I know that my face is.” He trails off. “I’m scared of any sort of expression looking like a Harry expression, and so I think that the journey for me in the last year is kind of about acceptance, of going, ‘This is my face and it was also the face that played Harry.’ I have to stop fighting that aspect, and not worry about being expressive at times. As far as I can tell, most actors’s main motivation is self-doubt and neuroses.”

I ask if he felt a great weight on his shoulders as an 11-year-old when he was chosen as the star of what was expected to be a blockbuster franchise? Was it stressful?

“Not at that age. I didn’t start to feel that pressure until much later. I think probably, that’s one of the best things about (director) Chris Columbus, he made the process so enjoyable we never thought of it as anything but fun, and it really wasn’t until the third film that I started going, ‘OK, now I want to really dedicate myself to this and start learning about acting and getting better.’”

That he was working alongside some of the greats of British film and theatre — Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, Gary Oldman — meant that he was learning from the best. Indeed there was little point in him going to Rada after he left school — not that he went to school, having had tutors on the set instead. But what about university?

A Young Doctor’s Notebook is a black comedy set during the Russian Revolution adapted from several short stories by his favourite Russian writer, Mikhail Bulgakov. His co-star is Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, who will play the same character, a doctor, in an older guise.

“I think they were going to release it in the spring of next year,” says Radcliffe, who adds that he’s “immensely flattered” that he might one day turn into Hamm. “And then they were, like, ‘Let’s release it at Christmas, because there’s lots of snow in it.’ It’s not remotely festive, but it’s snowing all the time.”

During filming he says he learned quite a lot about how to amputate limbs.

“And I do think I could probably perform a tracheotomy now.’

In terms of his role choices, you have to admire the determination with which he has avoided anything that can be compared to Harry Potter, especially when you consider how much pressure he must have been under to consolidate on his success in that role. Before the Ginsberg and the Bulgakov he had an even more unexpected stage debut, at the age of 18 in 2007. It was in Equus, Peter Shaffer’s controversial play about sexual deviation.

His life so far is hard to empathize with, I say — he’s the richest person under 30 in Britain, for example — but I wonder whether his teens were all that different from everyone else’s. When I was that age, as I recall, I was rather self-conscious. Was self-consciousness ever an option for him, given that he was by then used to having his face projected on cinema screens and billboards across the land?

“You can still be self-conscious in my position. And shy. Shyness displays itself differently in me. I think it’s more an awkwardness. Like when I go to those events, like the Baftas, or like I was invited to this thing called the Met Ball, and I ended up having a good night because I took a friend, but normally I feel very awkward at events like that.”

Because?

“Because I don’t feel that I’m good at small talk, and I’m not. You know, meeting people in that fleeting way, I never know how to give an accurate impression of myself, so I just become nervous, and stumbley.”

When people recognize him in the street, do they say, “Hey, there’s Harry Potter!” or do they say “There’s Daniel Radcliffe”?

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get Harry Potter at all. Of course I do. But you know what? I’d say the split is now rather encouragingly in favour of Daniel Radcliffe, which is rather lovely. I walked past two girls on a bench the other day, and I heard them both go, ‘Oh my God, it’s Daniel Radcliffe,’ and every time that happens I think: ‘Yesss!’ Not because they recognize me, because they use my name.”

One’s teenage years are awkward enough without having to live them in a spotlight, I say. Did he have people around him helping him deal with the pressures of fame — therapists, I suppose I mean?

“You know, the people I talk to are my mum and dad. They are amazing people, and were always great at making me aware of which parts of it were real and which weren’t, and making me aware of which parts were important and which were not.”

So even though he was growing up on film sets, where the whole world was apparently revolving around him, his parents managed to keep his ego in check?

“I don’t think that’s in me, to be honest. I’ve not got . . . I’ve always had, like, from the age of about 11, I’ve had such an intolerance for bad behaviour of actors that I don’t think I was ever going to be that person.”

What about the financial side of things?

“I have an amazing lawyer, and I have my mum, and I have my accountant, who was my mum’s accountant when she was young. He’s called Keith and he’s also brilliant.”

I imagine Keith knows how much young Daniel is worth, but does Daniel know?

“I do not, no. I hear things said, but I don’t know if any of them are true. And I never want to seem ungrateful for it all, but the money is not a motivating factor in my life.

“Also,” he adds with a laugh, “I would be the last person who should be left in charge of it, frankly. Because I am so terrible at maths. Not that I’d blow it or anything, but I just wouldn’t do anything with it.”

The rest of the interview can be read here. (Caution to parents: the article contains comments on drugs, alcohol and sexuality).

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The Guardian has posted an essay by J. K. Rowling regarding UK Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to reject the Leveson proposal to regulate the news media. Rowling and other victims of the press participated in the Leveson Inquiry in 2011 to assess the ethics of the British press, following a phone hacking scandal. You can read Rowling's response here or below.

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A new Wikipedia page has been made for Sony and J.K. Rowling's Wonderbook: Book of Spells Playstation video game! The new page can be viewed here.

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Daniel Radcliffe has joined Google+, and created a new official web page that keeps track of all official Daniel Radcliffe doings! The page can be seen here. Radcliffe's cover photo (similar to that of Facebook) of his Google+ page is a photograph of a message that reads:

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This month our contest is challenging you to share your favorite Wizarding Holiday story. To enter the contest write a 750 word (or less) story that answers this question: what holiday stories and beloved characters do wizard children grow up loving and asking to hear over and over again? 

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The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling's latest novel, will be made into a miniseries for the BBC, it's been reported today. BBC One and BBC Drama have entered an exclusive adaptation deal; it wil be produced by an independent production company produced by J.K. Rowling's agent, Neil Blair (on behalf of his agency, The Blair Partnership) and Rick Senat.

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Just as with during the Halloween season, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour will be adding a bit of holiday flare to the immersive sets and props they showcase from the Harry Potter films:

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