Rob Knox had a magical future in Harry Potter – until knife crime snuffed it out
Rob Knox was an 18-year-old actor with a bright future ahead of him. He had recently landed the role of Hogwarts student Marcus Belby in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Friends, family and co-stars remember him as a fun-loving, big-hearted kid.
Rob never got to see the film released. He was stabbed to death, six weeks before the premiere in 2008, by a stranger outside a pub. Rob was an innocent party, caught in the middle of a melee as he tried to protect his brother and friends. (K)nox: The Rob Knox Story (ITVX) recounted all of this.
The odd-sounding title was explained in the opening moments. A nox, in JK Rowling’s wizarding world, is a charm that causes the light at the end of a wand to be extinguished. Rob’s life was snuffed out when it had barely started. David Yates, director of Half-Blood Prince, and Jim Broadbent and Tom Felton, who acted opposite Rob in the film, recalled him fondly. In his biggest scene, Rob was required to shovel pudding into his face. Broadbent advised him to pace himself, knowing that there would be many takes. “Luckily for the humour in the scene, he ignored my advice and didn’t pace himself at all.” For Felton, Rob quickly became a companion off set, larking about between takes.
The story is told as simply as possible. It is one of grief. Home movie footage of Rob as a child; recollections from his parents and from his brother, Jamie, to whom he was devoted; and accounts of that terrible night. Rob’s father, Colin, described driving to the hospital and making desperate bargains with God. “I said to myself, if God was to spare my child, I’ll go to church every Sunday.” The film did not dignify the killer by mentioning his name.
That simplicity is the film’s strength, because there is nothing complicated about the message: knife crime is a scourge, and it is out of control. We can talk forever about socio-economic problems leading youths into crime but, as Ray Winstone said here, let’s just get more police on the streets.
As the film pointed out, there have been nearly 3,000 victims of fatal knife crime since Knox's death and the making of this film; without the Harry Potter connection, it would have made a couple of paragraphs in the local paper.
(K)nox: The Rob Knox Story is on ITVX now
