Tom Felton talks about Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Tom Felton gave a VERY lengthy interview to Good Prattle in which he talks about Draco Malfoy in Deathly Hallows (among other things). Here’s an excerpt:

Good, good, good. Finally, yeah. I think I was rambling on about… oh, yes, [Draco's] vulnerability, and how there’s a completely different side of him [in Half-Blood Prince] that hasn’t really been exposed in years previous. Obviously, he’s been given an actual chance for depth, say, whereas before he was always sort of an annoying, slimy git, but in the back of the classroom. But in that respect I had to take a lot more sort of gentle and soft approach to how he might deal with his task.

We also get to see that he’s not doing what he is doing for Voldemort so much as for his family.
Completely, yeah. Sure. But it’s all in the eyes of his father, isn’t it, really? Normally it’s locked away, but now he feels like he’s the man of the house and he needs to sort of represent the Malfoy Manor to the fullest, really, and, yeah, he’s not built from the same stuff as young Harry is. He’s not cut from the same cloth, by any means, and he certainly can’t hold his nerve when he needs to.

Yeah. What sort of relationship do you think he has with his father?
A very interesting one, actually! I mean, mostly he idolizes his father to every last degree, and equally, I’m sure, he’s terrified of his father! He’s absolutely petrified, and I think most things are done maybe 20% fully from the fear that he might get another clock around the ear! I’d be intrigued to hear what Joanne Rowling would have to say about that.

Yeah. Certainly, he’s not the most decent person, but he has a reason, because he’s had a very different sort of upbringing.
Sure. I mean, one thing for sure is he’s not the way he is out of chance. He’s well and truly been brought up that way, if that makes sense. In this film coming up, I think the ultimate goal that David Yates [the director] and I sat down and spoke earlier on is that we want to make him do some of these horrible things and to instigate some terrible notions but at the same time—for the audience to hate him, as they always have done, naturally, but also to feel terrifically sorry for him and to empathize with the situation that he’s in, because, in modern terms, you’ve been given a gun and told to shoot the Prime Minister or the President. He’s been given a task that, really, he’s not up for.

You can read the rest here; it’s a very interesting look at how Malfoy transforms and develops his personality.