Sean Biggerstaff – Why The Oliver Wood Actor Hasn’t Become A Bigger Star

British Actors
what's up with sean biggerstaff

Sean Biggerstaff is an actor from Scotland and one of the many people whose career got a giant lift from the Harry Potter franchise. He began as a child and seemed to have peaked at his teenage period. After this, his career didn’t seem to fly. But why is that so? Some actors came out of Harry Potter to become big stars and went on to do great things in the industry. What could have been the issue with Biggerstaff? We would attempt to answer this question and also talk about his life.

How old is Sean Biggerstaff?

Biggerstaff was born in Glasgow and was raised in the working-class area of Maryhill by his firefighter father and his community education worker mother. He had his elementary and high school in the city.

It’s now more than twenty years since we saw Sean Biggerstaff in Harry Potter. The tendency is to continually see him as the boy in Harry Potter. Biggerstaff was born in March 1983.

If our math hold, he is 38 years old today.

Movies and TV shows

Sean Biggerstaff became interested in acting as a boy of five in primary school. At five, he joined the drama group and at ten he had his professional role at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow.

At 13, BBC Scotland came knocking at his door. He got a role in “The Crow Road” a TV drama made from the book of the same title by Scottish writer Iain Banks released in 1992.

In 1997, he was in the movie, “The Winter Guest”, a drama set on a wintry day in Scotland that has a group of strange characters. There are two women who do nothing with their lives but attend funerals of strangers they don’t know. There are two random teenage girls. There are a random mother and daughter tag team and two random boys who play truants from school, one of them named Tom was played by a certain Sean Biggerstaff.

Enjoy an exclusive extract of Empire magazine's interview with Sean Biggerstaff | Wizarding WorldIn 2001, Biggerstaff joined the cast of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” where he played the role of Oliver Wood who was described as “big and burly”. It was a minor role, or a secondary role if euphemism is your thing, but he brought such brilliance and original Scottish accent into his character that he packed fans in the truckloads.

Biggerstaff went on to feature in two more movies of the franchise, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” in 2002 and nearly ten years later, an uncredited cameo in “Harry Potter and the Deadly Harrow part 2”.

Other of Sean Biggerstaff’s credits include “Cashback”, a romantic comedy movie from 2006 where he acted opposite the massively gifted Emilia Fox in a movie that was only able to make 2.3 million in the box office, “Mary Queen of Scots” where he played the role of James Hepburn whom you should know as 1st Duke of Orkney, or the 4th Earl of Bothwell, or just a prominent Scottish nobleman from the sixteenth century.

Why hasn’t Biggerstaff become a bigger star?

1. Because not every child actor grows up to become a big star. Some actors are destined to be big as children, some as teenagers, and some still just when they attained adulthood. If you’re destined to be great only as a child, you were it on your sleeves like a crown. This is a terrible rewording of Tarion Lannister’s line but did you get the gist?

There are actors who make it as kids and also as adults, you point out. Yes, so what’s your point.

2. He didn’t move to America. The British founded English, the language of entertainment, but it was to the Americans that the gods bestowed leadership in entertainment. Perhaps if Sean Biggerstaff moved to Hollywood where the British accent is cherished he may get more opportunities to excel in his chosen career.

Sean Biggerstaff chose to remain in the United Kingdom which has a far smaller industry and a big pool of thespians to choose from.

We have an endless list of British actors who broke into the limelight at home then went on to become stars in Hollywood. We have this, this, this, this, etc. And moving to America is not just a British thing. It’s generally in the Commonwealth; we have this, this, this, this, etc.

3. Because it’s not yet over. Earlier we mentioned how some actors are made to be child stars and some are made for adulthood. At 38, Sean Biggerstaff still has decades under his belt.

Robert De Niro is 77, Al Pacino is 80, and Joe Pesci is 78 (did you watch The Irishman?). You can’t close his chapter yet, Sean Biggerstaff has up to forty years to keep trying.

Image source: Amazon


KC

KC

KC is a contributor based in Europe and learning the art, one post at a time