Every night on Broadway, Tom Felton walks on stage to a roar from the audience. He had expected the reaction to die down after the first week, but it never did. Almost 15 years after his final appearance as Draco Malfoy on screen, Felton has spent the past 10 months playing the character again in the Broadway production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
I meet the actor in a dressing room at NBC Studios, just off Times Square in New York. He's just finished a live television appearance and in a few hours will be back on stage for his next performance. He greets me with a hug and says he is excited to speak to BBC News because his mum and 100-year-old grandfather will see it.
His family are some of his biggest supporters - his mum has seen the show five times already, while his dad is due to visit next month. That support mirrors the enthusiasm Felton has encountered from Harry Potter fans, which he says still surprises him more than two decades after he first played Draco. "I thought the applause would stop in the first week and it has not.
"It's very humbling and lovely to know how much the characters still mean to people now and if it brings them to the theatre, that's the best." He is also struck by how many of the fans now approaching him were not alive when the first Harry Potter film was released. "There are fans that approach me shouting 'Draco' who weren't even born when I was in the first film," he says. Felton was the first of the original Harry Potter cast to reprise his role in the theatre show, but he will not be the only one for much longer, as Rupert Grint is set to return as Ron Weasley on Broadway in February.
The 38-year-old actor says he called his former co-star as soon as he heard the news. "We are typically - and he will agree with me - pretty bad at our phone game, but when I heard the news I called him immediately and I'm so excited for him," Felton says. "Who doesn't want to see Rupert Grint play Ron Weasley again?
Come on!" I ask whether Felton offered any advice to his co-star but he laughs and says absolutely not, pointing out that Grint has already appeared on Broadway. "I don't think he needs any advice from me. If anything, I would be taking it from him." He adds that Grint has a "Ron Weasley laissez-faire approach to these things".
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