Matthew Lewis half-revealed that his next role will be a lead role for a BBC project - no word on if it's a series or movie - which he will begin shooting shortly in South Africa for a spring 2014 television release, announced The Independent in a new interview with the Harry Potter actor.

Matt also talked about playing Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter series for a decade and how much recognition he still gets from fans to this day, as well as the theatrical and DVD release of his movie, The Rise (also called Wasteland).

“It’s sort of got, well, I say worse, but it’s not a bad thing. I get recognised a lot more nowadays than I did five years ago, which is odd.” Especially so when you consider that physical transformation: gone is the pudge, the lank hair, the buck teeth; and it’s not all down to training for Sunday’s 13.1 miles. And, yes, he did get his teeth “done”, which is basically shorthand for wearing braces. Not until he was through with being Neville, though; he was under contract not to fix his “pretty bad teeth” until filming had finished. “Which meant I had to go for 10 f---ing years without having anything done.”

“When we got to film three, and I’d got quite tall and slimmed out a bit, they decided that they were uncomfortable with that, and thought, ‘No, we need to make him a bit geeky looking’, or geekier, I should say, so they put me in a fat suit and false teeth.” The whole ensemble made the poor teenage Lewis so miserable that David Yates, who directed the final four films, agreed he could ditch the teeth, although the suit stayed.

“Looking back on it, it doesn’t really bother me at all, but at the time, when you’re going through puberty and you’re on a film set with a lot of attractive girls anyway, and then back at school as well, and you have to wear this fat suit, and have this long greasy hair – oh, yeah, at the time, it was rubbish. It was really rubbish.”

On The Rise: “It was supposed to be a nondescript northern town. But one of the things Rowan [Athale, the director] said was that he didn’t want it to be one of those typical knives, hoodies, guns, south London gangsta movies which he felt, and I agree, have been done to death. For a start, he didn’t want any guns in the movie … he didn’t want it to be the typical glamorising of that entire world.”

Casey O