According to the casting director, Fiona Weir, the minute Evanna walked through the door, she knew that “there was only one Luna”. For Evanna, it seems that there was never any doubt either. “I always compare it to this line in the movie, where Harry says, as he’s trying to encourage Dumbledore’s Army to fight, ‘Think of all the great wizards in history – they had to start somewhere. And they could do it, so, why can’t you?’. I just thought, why would someone else get this part? It has to be me. She was the one I put the most attention on, and I just love her.”

Given that it was January last year that Evanna learnt she had gotten the part, has she managed to come down from Cloud Nine by now? “Oh, it still feels like some kind of fairytale,” she smiles. “You keep dreaming about it, and it becomes such a fantasy, but you keep telling yourself, these kinds of dreams never come true. But it did, and I was just stunned. Still am.”

Was it a shock to Evanna’s system when she got the call? “This is going to sound silly, but I didn’t find it really hard to believe,” she answers, “because I’d been preparing myself for the idea for so long. I was still stunned though. I had to keep it really quiet for a few days.” That must have been difficult. “Yeah, I was going into school, and they all knew I’d been to the audition. ‘Have you heard back yet?’. ‘No, no callback yet’. It was really frustrating.”

Most parents of budding movie star kids are worried that boring old education might take a permanent backseat for their starry-eyed offspring, but here… “It was actually the opposite. I’m very driven, and I don’t need anyone to tell me that I should do my homework. And I’m getting really worried about this exam now, and my parents are telling me, ‘Stop! Stop doing your homework!’.”

So, what about that first day on set – all a bit of a daze? “Daze is definitely the word. I wanted to see everything, and I wanted to get everything perfect. I would get worried when it wasn’t perfect and I was holding everybody up. When they would shout ‘cut’ and start to move on, I would be asking everyone if that was it, was that the scene that was going to be in the film. I kept wanting to do it again, to make it better and better. That really scared me. You get used to it very quickly though. “I would always read the book before, because Luna is so important here, I wanted her to be exactly as how I imagined her in the book. So, I just read the book to refresh it all the time, between each scene.”

And what about Evanna Lynch – what’s she going to do when her Harry Potter adventure is well and truly over? “I would love to act again, absolutely,” she finishes, “but, right now, it’s just my Junior Cert and Harry Potter. That’s more than enough for a 15-year old girl to have to contend with, don’t you think?”