Daniel Radcliffe not backing down from confronting J.K. Rowling in 2020 essay
Daniel Radcliffe, nominated for his first Tony Award earlier this week in the Best Featured Actor (Musical) category for his work in “Merrily We Roll Along,” talked about his frayed relationship with author and producer J.K. Rowling in a recent interview.
Rowling, the creator of the “Harry Potter” franchise, has positioned herself at the center of the oftentimes nasty dialogue over transgender rights. This unanticipated second career of Rowling’s makes the actor – who landed the role of The Boy Who Lived at the age of 12 – “really sad,” he said.
In June 2020, after the NGO group Nevex used the term “people who menstruate,” Rowling responded on Twitter/X by writing, “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” This led to a tremendous amount of backlash, culminating in an essay Radcliffe penned in response on the website for The Trevor Project.
“I’d worked with the Trevor Project for 12 years and it would have seemed like, I don’t know, immense cowardice to me to not say something,” the actor revealed in the new interview. “I wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by the comments. And to say that if those are Jo’s views, then they are not the views of everybody associated with the ‘Potter’ franchise.”
The actor and writer have not been in contact since 2020, he said.
He continued, acknowledging that “nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without [Rowling], but that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.” He added, “I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”
More recently, a commenter on Twitter/X told Rowling they expected Radcliffe and co-star Emma Watson, who also came out against her, to offer an apology. The author and producer responded, “Celebs who cozied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatized de-transitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single-sex spaces,”
The Harry Potter franchise is one of the most lucrative in existence, with eight feature films, an ongoing stage show, and a theme park. The movies have been nominated for 12 Academy Awards, mostly in categories like Art Direction and Makeup, but also for John Williams’s original score.
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