“Shut your mouth! You dare speak his name with your unworthy lips, you dare besmirch it with your half-blood's tongue, you dare —”
- ―Bellatrix Lestrange to Harry Potter
Bellatrix Lestrange is one of the two secondary antagonists (alongside Peter Pettigrew) of the Harry Potter franchise. She is one of the most powerful dark witches in her time and the one to perform the Cruciatus Curse on Neville Longbottom's parents. Bellatrix is Voldemort's most loyal and trusted follower and former love and the mother of their daughter Delphini (who is the main antagonist of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child).
Background[]
Bellatrix Black was the daughter of Cygnus Black III and Druella Black (nee Rosier). She had two sisters: Narcissa and Andromeda and had a fairly strained relationship with her cousin, Sirius Black. At eleven, Bella began attending school at Hogwarts and was sorted into Slytherin. Bellatrix joined the Death Eaters after graduating from Hogwarts. She participated in the torture of Frank and Alice Longbottom. Raised alongside Narcissa and Andromedus to put pure-bloods on a pedestal, Bellatrix becomes far more malevolent and bloodthirsty than either of her sisters (one of whom outright broke away from their family's ideals), and proves herself to be extremely hateful and sadistic even by the Death Eater organization's standards, with an entire montage of Kick the Dog moments: alongside Barty Crouch Jr., she tortured Neville's parents, Frank and Alice Longbottom, to the point of insanity by means of the Cruciatus Curse; after meeting Neville she immediately mocks him about it; she threatens to torture 14/15-year-olds Ginny and Neville to force Harry's cooperation; she kills Sirius Black, her own cousin, and then sadistically taunts Harry about it; taunts Harry for not using the Cruciatus Curse properly on her and then proceeds to use it on him instead; she tortures Hermione (who's only a teenager), carving the word "mudblood" (a slurr used for muggle-born wizards and witches) onto her arm while she helplessly screams in pain; she kills Dobby, a fan-favorite character, with a throwing knife; during the Battle of Hogwarts, she personally killed Nymphadora Tonks, her own niece, showing no remorse; she taunts Molly Weasley about her son's death during their duel. She doesn't do anything cool with her dark magic at all.
Personality[]
Bellatrix is quite cruel, evil, wicked and vindictive. She is known to be quite psychotic, as she always laughs. She is very loyal to Voldemort, her master, and also kills in his name. She had an obsessive love for her master, and he even had a sexual relationship with her that caused the birth of her daughter, Delphini. Despite her usually amicable relationship with her sister Narcissa, she shows no sympathy towards her when Voldemort orders her son Draco to kill Dumbledore (widely considered to be a suicide mission) and claims she would happily sacrifice her own child for Voldemort if she had one. She is very obnoxious, as she repeatedly addresses Harry in a "mock-baby voice" and challenges Severus Snape for ten pages in a row (and gets roasted about fifty times in a row) just to provide unneeded exposition for the reader. Like many of the most vile witches and wizards of their universe, Bellatrix is extremely prejudiced against Muggles, Squibs, and Muggle-borns, and while she does sincerely love Voldemort, not only does she start openly questioning his judgment as soon as Harry reveals he is secretly half-blood (through his Muggle father Tom Riddle), but her genuine care for him as a person would be far less potent if he wasn't an embodiment of her prejudicial and supremacist ideology. Overall, she is extremely petulant and barbarous and wants destruction and misery solely for its own sake.
Trivia[]
- Bellatrix is one of the most evil characters in the Harry Potter franchise, along with Voldemort and Dolores Umbridge, being ultimately pure evil.
- An odd change to the Deathly Hallows from the book to the film was both Bellatrix's final words and their placement. In the book, her final words were "What will happen to your children once I've killed you? When Mummy's gone the same way as Freddie?" These were said after nearly killing Ginny with the Killing Curse. In the film, her final lines were much earlier, when she said "No! No, come back! Lucius! Come back! Come back and fight! Come back!" after the Malfoys left the fight. She was completely silent aside from a maniacal laugh during her final scene.
- The most likely reason for this was because, during the filming of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Helena Bonham Carter also filmed The King's Speech. She was glad about this because she could spare her voice and did not have to scream all day and these final words would have had her screaming.
- Helen McCory was originally cast as Bellatrix in the films, but was forced to withdraw due to pregnancy, resulting in Bonham Carter replacing her. McCrory would later play Narcissa Malfoy in the films.
- In the film, Bellatrix's last battle against Molly until her death and moments where she corners Ginny was depicted very differently, though in both cases, she starts off cornering Ginny with the Killing Curse:
- In the film, Ginny was cornered after using the Shield Charm to deflect a curse from Bellatrix, possibly the Killing Curse, before Molly takes over and duels her to her death, for trying to harm her daughter. If she did cast the Killing Curse against Ginny, this is canonically false, as in canon, this spell cannot be blocked with any kind of Shield Charm. In the book, Ginny was cornered along with Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood and survived the Killing Curse simply by avoiding it by an inch.
- Bellatrix's battle was more intense in the book, as the book describes the ground between the two dueling Witches becoming increasingly hot and cracked while they both fire curses at each other. Bellatrix even sadistically mocks Molly over Fred's death, which was her very fatal mistake due to underestimating her opponent.
- Bellatrix's death was different in the film series, compared to its portrayal in the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In the book, while dueling Molly Weasley, she is killed by Molly after she hits her in her chest with an unknown but deadly curse, which causes her lifeless corpse to fall to the ground, leaving her with a frozen expression on her face. However, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2, while also dueling Molly Weasley, Molly manages to overpower her and cast a spell on her which suspends her in the air and freezes her body, and then disintegrates her with a curse into black smithereens.
- Ironically, Bellatrix Lestrange's actress, Helena Bonham Carter, is much more amicable and easily got along with her fellow actors and actresses throughout the filming of the Harry Potter films. Tom Felton, Draco Malfoy's actor, constantly mentions how amusing it is to see Helena Bonham Carter play a half-crazy murderer when the camera rolls, and return to being a perfectly normal woman once the scene ends.
- While filming the stand-off scene in the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Helena profusely apologized to Matthew Lewis, Neville Longbottom's actor, upon discovering that she injured one of his eardrums by mistake. At that time, she ad-libbed by sticking her wand prop in his ear "as a sort of Q-Tip...(to) sort of torture (his ear)" only for him to unexpectedly move his head towards her, resulting the aforementioned injury.
- Similarly, after shooting the scene where Bellatrix carved "Mudblood" into Hermione's arm during the torture scene of Deathly Hallows — Part 1, which admittedly was an idea that she and Emma Watson (Hermione's actress) came up together on the spur of the moment during filming, the intensity and brutality of the scene concerned Helena so much that she approached Emma Watson immediately afterwards to make sure they were still on good terms.
- Bellatrix's role in the movie adaption of The Half-Blood Prince is greatly expanded as she did not take part in Dumbledore's death in the novels and also never attacked the Weasley residence (the entire attack never happens in the books). Her only appearance in the novel was accompanying her sister to Snape's house to bear witness to him swearing his unbreakable vow.
- Bellatrix's defeat at hands of Molly Weasley, which J.K. Rowling intended to show how her impure, obsessive love toward Lord Voldemort put her at grave disadvantage against the latter who driven by the latter's pure, unconditional love towards people she held most dear brought criticisms from some fans who argued that it would be more appropriate if Neville assisted Molly in their intense duel, even at slightest, as Bellatrix is admittedly personal adversary for him as much as Molly. Taking into account of her latest controversies however, Rowling's reasoning behind it was certainly marred by her bias thus justifying criticisms in question.
- Bellatrix is one of only two people Harry has used the Cruciatus Curse against (the other being her fellow Death Eater Amycus Carrow).
- The Mudblood" scar which Bellatrix carved on Hermione's arm was not in the book, but a scene both Carter and Watson devised. However, it acts as an allusion to the serial numbers tattooed on the prisoners' arms in Auschwitz.
- The tattoos have three purposes: to mark and humiliate prisoners, to prevent their escape and to expedite the identification of corpses.