For many parents, hearing the words “I want to act” could be likened to the kiss of death. In an instant—not a request for permission but a vulnerable, earnest demand to be heard and taken seriously—a sudden and irreversible precedence is set up, one that forever impacts the future of a child’s self-discovery; do you encourage them to vigorously and relentlessly follow their passion, or do you squander their optimism and imagination with the harshness of reality? Either side of the fence comes with its pros and cons, so it comes as no surprise that Donald and Victoria Rowe found themselves unsure how to respond when their ten-year-old son Desmund approached them with his latest aspiration.

Not that they didn’t believe in Des or the integrity of his latest interest, but acting was most recent in a long list of hobbies that insofar failed to maintain the young boy’s attention span. Uniforms for every sport under the sun lined the inside of Desmund’s closet. The trumpet he insisted he wanted to learn gathered dust in the attic. Chess club failed to enthuse him and, after an exploding potato via a school project gone wrong, so did science club (which would prove ironic much later down the line and the subject matter of one embarrassing San Diego Comic-Con question from an audience member). Desmund was a quiet kid, not shy but uncomfortable in his own skin around most of his peers except for the small handful of friends he managed to make at school. “You know that acting requires you to perform in front of an audience,” his dad told him, wondering if the idea of performing in public might deter his son's interest. To his parents' surprise, Des replied, “That’s the point,” and they subsequently decided to let him try out theatre. They signed Des up for a local youth acting troupe in Glasgow. From the moment Desmund took the stage, it became obvious that the spotlight would be what finally drew him out of his shell and where he was bound to flourish.

Within two years, Des auditioned for the Scottish Youth Theatre and was accepted into their Foundation Course. There he participated in a variety of stage productions, though none proved as significant as the last one. A casting agent was looking for a young male actor around his age for a part in the new Harry Potter films and had come to a performance scouting potential talent. Des was already a fan of the book series and near well fainted when he got approached after the show with a contact number. Within a week, the script for Philosopher's Stone was in his hands. Des auditioned for the part of Oliver Wood and was cast almost immediately afterwards.

His first brush of fame, and one within a franchise so universally popular, propelled Des forward in a way he never could have anticipated. Before he was cast, he had been considering which drama schools to apply for in the coming year. More formal training and a few extra years of stage productions under his belt could only strengthen his craft, and choosing that as his next step provided a time buffer to decide if he wanted to stick to theatre or pursue other varieties of acting. Instead, he was temporarily relocating to London with his mother to be closer to Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire and putting any further stage pursuits on hold. Acting in front of a camera thrilled Des like performing in front of a live audience did, perhaps even more so to a sixteen-year-old knowing that his performance would be seen on screens across the world and not just by people living in Glasgow. Unfortunately, the expiration date on his contract came much sooner than it did the majority of his castmates with his character appearing only in the first two films (though he was signed to come back later if they asked, which he did for the franchise’s last movie Deathly Hallows: Part 2).

Already having devoted so much of his time to the stage, Desmund didn’t think twice about putting his theatre pursuits on the back burner indefinitely. He moved by himself to London at just eighteen years old in order to start auditioning for more films and television series. No one seemed to want to hire a kid fresh off of his first job, especially when that job was a children’s movie about witches and wizards at a magical school. The money from his Potter contract kept him afloat for a short while as he wove in and out of audition rooms, but he managed to score his first post-Potter role in the Royal National Theatre's production of The History Boys. The rest of this biography is a work in progress based on recent credit changes.