Alan Rickman had already accepted the role of Severus Snape when he asked J.K. Rowling for help understanding how to play him. He said the role felt like it was traveling down 2 paths at once and needed her guidance.
What she finally gave him was tiny. He called it “one small image,” a single piece of information he vowed he would never repeat, and it was enough to tell him he had to play two things at the same time.
She never told him the ending. Rickman said he knew the story book by book, “like everybody else,” and bought each new novel along with the rest of the world, with no idea where Snape was headed.
The clue stayed secret for years. Four days after Rickman died in January 2016, Rowling answered a fan on Twitter and tied it to a single word, writing, “I told Alan what lies behind the word ‘always.’”
His own diaries filled in the rest. After finishing the final book in 2007, Rickman wrote that “one small piece of information from Jo Rowling seven years ago, Snape loved Lily, gave me a cliff edge to hang on to.”
In his own words: “When I was asked to play it, I said to the producers that I have to talk to her because I don’t know how to play this part, because it seems to be traveling potentially down two avenues at the same time. So we were put together on the phone and Jo Rowling was with her sister at the time, she said ‘I can’t talk, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’ So that’s how close she held everything to herself.
And I said, look, I do not know how to play this. And then she gave me one very small piece of information, which I always have vowed I would never ever repeat. One small image, and I thought, oh, okay, well, that at least means I have to play sort of two things at once. She did not tell me what was going to happen. I knew book by book, like everybody else, what the narrative was, but I certainly did not know what the ending was.”
