J.K. Rowling Finally Reveals the Secret She Told Alan Rickman About Snape

Get ready to have your heart strings pulled once again. Following the tragic death of Alan Rickman, J.K. Rowling has finally revealed the secret she told him about his character Severus Snape — and it's even more perfect than you could have imagined. After a fan inquired about the hidden tidbit, the Harry Potter author took to Twitter on Monday.

During an interview with HitFix in 2011, Rickman explained that Rowling gave him some interesting information to help him get into character. "[It] helped me think that he was more complicated and that the story was not going to be as straight down the line as everybody thought," he said. "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 it 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. What I knew was he was a human being and not an automaton, and I knew there was some sense of protection for Harry or I worked that out. It was enough to know, I didn't know he was a double agent."