Submit your Harry Potter quiz with Fast Show star Mark Williams | Culture

Twenty-five years have now passed since the beginning Harry Potter the film and, with HBO’s reboot due this Christmas, Warner Bros. is adding to the festivities. Key among them is the new unveiling of a studio tour showcasing period pieces, costumes and props from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

That’s why Mark Williams is now taking your questions – even though, as Potter purists will know, his character doesn’t appear in the first film. Arthur Weasley does, however, play a major role in the other seven films, so let’s skip it.

In the movies, Williams plays the minister of magic, the husband of Julie Walters’ Molly Weasley and the father of Ron, Ginny, Fred, George, Percy, Charlie and Bill – a role he had to put his red hair on.

“I turned into a ginger haired man,” he said in 2005prompting Stephen Fry to ask if the move was “for work or sex?”

Williams answers your questions about all things Potter, and about his career so far, from his early work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater in England to his success. The Fast Show in the 1990s – his most famous character, which probably still makes shopping for clothes dangerous.

Speaking of being a little discouraged early in his career, Williams, now 66, said: “I think it took me a long time to get better because I have a face like a bag of crocodiles.”

Other films include Stardust, 101 Dalmatians, The Borrowers, Shakespeare in Love, Cock and Bulk Story, Albert Nobbs and Aardman’s Early Man. On the small screen, meanwhile, he has appeared on Red Dwarf, Doctor Who, Carrie & Barry, Bottom, Saxondale, as Mr Beebe in the 2007 adaptation of A Room With a View and as the lead in 140 episodes of Father Brown (as well as making a cameo as the same white man in the Sister Boniface Mysteries). Two more seasons of the show have started filming soon.

He also presented the quiz show The Link in 2014 and 2015, and led four documentaries on the history of UK companies, which taught him, he said, “What people face is that we often rely too much on the wrong things. The Victorians relied too much on coal, and they destroyed their cities and their children from the Neolim era.

“We think we’re smarter than our ancestors, but we’re not. We still raise our children randomly, and if there’s more than one switch, we still don’t know which one turns on the light.” Americans spent millions of dollars trying to develop a pen that would work in space.

Submit your questions for Williams by noon BST on Monday 4 May and we’ll publish them in June in our regular reader chat.