The One Tragic Harry Potter Death Alan Rickman Wasn't Impressed With
Alan Rickman had a truly impressive career before his untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2016, but he's best known for playing Professor Severus Snape in all eight Harry Potter movies.
The actor's performance in this role brought him worldwide fame and completely supplanted Snape's image from the books in the minds of Harry Potter fandom. As his recently published diaries, Madly, Deeply: The Diary of Alan Rickman, demonstrate, he also had plenty to say about his own work on the Wizarding World franchise and many other aspects of these movies.
In particular, the actor was not impressed with the tragic climax of the sixth movie, the death of Albus Dumbledore, where Snape delivered the killing spell. He wrote: "We don't know – or remember – enough about individual characters' concerns to understand their issues. Or care."
To be fair, in filming that scene the scriptwriters faced a formidable challenge. As the 7th book came out years before the 6th movie, virtually the entire audience was guaranteed to know that Dumbledore's death was a mercy kill, pre-arranged by Dumbledore himself, so that Snape, who in truth was Dumbledore's closest ally and friend at that point, could prove his ostensible loyalty to Voldermort. So the whole drama lost much of its sting.
Furthermore, the scene was a convergence of the plotline that concerned real motives, plans and moves of Dumbledore and Snape with the plotline that concerned Draco Malfoy's attempts to assassinate Dumbledore on Voldemort's orders, the plotline on which much of The Half-Blood Prince was spent, but which ultimately was merely a decoy for the real plot – Draco never had enough skill to overcome one of the strongest wizards in the world or enough viciousness to become a murderer, and another reason why Dumbledore had to die the exact way he did was saving Draco from Voldemort's punishment for failure.
No wonder that the scene left something to be desired. Alan Rickman, at least, not merely criticized, but did his best to help make it more dramatic. An original cut of the scene seemingly had Snape reminding the audience that he vowed to Draco's mother to protect her son and finish the murderous task assigned to Draco, if need be, thus explaining his decision to step in and kill Dumbledore himself.
That, of course, only misdirected the attention from the fact that Snape now had to steel himself into killing his only friend, even if that friend was dying anyway, towards the oath that was meant to deceive both Voldemort and the readers. Rickman's arguments seemingly won the day, because in the theatrical version of the scene Snape remained deathly quiet, except for the killing spell itself.