When we first meet Ginny in the original books, her brother Ron (Rupert Grint), the family’s youngest boy and Harry’s best friend, warns Harry that Ginny has developed a bit on a crush on “The Boy Who Lived,” as Harry is often called due to his defeat of the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) when he was just a baby. In the second installment, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” Ginny is painfully shy (in both the film and book versions!), particularly when it comes to Harry. As it happens, she’s also hiding an enormous secret … which is that she’s been corresponding with the memory of Voldemort’s younger self, Tom Riddle, through an enchanted diary all year and is the person responsible for opening the legendary Chamber of Secrets (through his possession).
After Harry rescues Ginny from the Chamber in the books, she lightens up quite a lot, making jokes around him whenever he spends time with the Weasley family (which he does often) and by the time the fifth novel rolls around, she rules. She starts calling Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poésy) “Phlegm” after Fleur starts dating the oldest Weasley son Bill (Domhnall Gleeson), is the one who comes up with the name “Dumbledore’s Army” just to piss off the Ministry of Magic, and also keeps people in check. In the book “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” when Harry is fretting that he’s being possessed by Voldemort and won’t speak to anyone as a result, Ginny fires back.
“Well, that was a bit stupid of you,” as Ginny angrily says to Harry in that book, “seeing as you don’t know anyone but me who’s been possessed by You-Know-Who, and I can tell you how it feels.” In the next book, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” after Harry and Ginny start dating (more on that in a second), she says to Harry, Ron, and Hermione (Emma Watson) as they’re all in the Gryffindor common room, “Three Dementor attacks in a week, and all Romilda Vane does is ask me if it’s true you’ve got a Hippogriff tattooed across your chest.” (She says she claimed it was a Hungarian Horntail since it’s “much more macho,” and also jokes that she said Ron has a Pygmy Puff tattoo in a mystery location.)