Professor Severus Snape is undoubtedly one of the most complex yet fan-favorite Harry Potter characters. He is methodical and doesn’t go with the cheerfulness of other Hogwarts wizards or witches.
Despite his very rude and hard appearance and his attitude towards Harry Potter, Snape seems to have a soft heart but it is only visible in anecdotes and secret messages. Once he told Potter about how much he regretted Lily’s death, but not in plain words.
Snape Sent a Coded Message to Harry Potter
There is no secret that Snape played by Alan Rickman has a soft corner in his heart for Harry Potter’s mother Lily Potter. Her death was a huge blow to the Superfluous Snake. When Harry Potter was in his class, he delivered a coded message in this line:
“What would I get if I added root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”
In an attempt to decipher the message, an Instagram user under the handle name its_ivanmars revealed the mindblowing secret message after 25 years. Snape mentioned ‘asphodel’ and ‘wormwood’ in the line. Diving deep, they found that asphodel is a flower belonging to the Lily family which was also Harry’s mother’s name. But there’s more. As per the Victorian flower language, it means “My regret follow you to the grave” and wormwood explicitly symbolizes “absence.” Evidently, Snape was still in pain with the death of Lily and expressed that to her son in the coded message years before his death at the hands of Voldemort.
Alan Rickman Kept JK Rowling’s Secret Involving His Character And Lily Potter
JK Rowling, the mastermind behind the Harry Potter book series once revealed that she told a huge secret about Snape to Rickman. The late actor kept it quiet for a long long time. Rowling “gave me one tiny, little, left-of-field piece of information that helped me think that he was more complicated,” Rickman said in an interview in 2011 (via Daily Mail).
“And that the story was not going to be as straight down the line as everybody thought. If you remember when I did the first film she’d only written three or four books, so nobody knew where it was really going except her. And its was important for her that I know something, but she only gave me a tiny piece of information which helped me think it was a more ambiguous route,” he added.
So, Rickman was always aware of his character’s future before it was even penned down. He was aware of the fact that Snape has always loved Lily who sacrificed her life to protect baby Harry.
