Why ‘Harry Potter’ star Daniel Radcliffe condemned JK Rowling’s anti-trans tweets
- The actor, who previously worked with LGBTQ hotline the Trevor Project, said he spoke on behalf of his queer and trans fans
- Radcliffe stars as parody singer Weird Al Yankovic in his latest film
Actor Daniel Radcliffe, famous for playing the lead in the “Harry Potter” series, attends the premiere of “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”, his latest project. Photo: APDaniel Radcliffe is holding firm in his stance against transphobia, shedding light on why he felt the need to speak up in 2020 when Harry Potter author JK Rowling made polarising remarks about transgender people.
The Weird: The Al Yankovic Story star, who came of age on-screen as the titular boy in Warner Bros.’ eight-film Harry Potter franchise, joined several Wizarding World leads in condemning the billionaire author and standing up for those who were hurt by Rowling’s tweets mocking the phrase “people who menstruate.”
“The reason I … felt very, very much as though I needed to say something when I did was because, particularly since finishing ‘Potter,’ I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter on that,” Radcliffe recently told IndieWire. “And so seeing them hurt on that day I was like, I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way. And that was really important.”
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At the time, Radcliffe had for years been working with the Trevor Project – the crisis intervention and suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQ youth – and wrote an open letter for the non-profit that asserted, “Transgender women are women.”
“Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional healthcare associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I,” he wrote, also acknowledging that Rowling was “unquestionably responsible for the course my life has taken.”
The 33-year-old actor, who has since starred in films including Escape From Pretoria and Guns Akimbo, also reiterated that position in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter published on Monday.
Radcliffe said that since playing Harry, he’d come to appreciate how many of his fans were “trans or nonbinary or gender nonconforming in some way, and Potter was a huge part of that identity.”
That and a “growing awareness of the money I had and wanting to do something useful with that” led him to start working with the Trevor Project while performing Equus in New York, he told Hollywood Reporter.
“There was a moment where I was like, I can’t look myself in the eye if I’ve been working with this organisation for 10 years and I don’t say anything,” Radcliffe said.
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Since completing work on the final Potter film, 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, the actor has made several unique creative choices. He worked in theatre and shied away from franchise fare. He also played a series of eccentric characters in films and TV projects such as Swiss Army Man, Horns, Miracle Workers and The Lost City.
The roles he chose turned out to be by design and helped him land his most recent gig in Weird as parody musician Yankovic. (He’s also starring in an upcoming off-Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.)
“When I finished Potter and was trying to figure out what my career was after that, I always said that I wanted to be the kind of actor that keeps his roles interesting enough that when you’ve got something coming out, people go, ‘Oh, he’s in that, he always makes interesting choices,’” he said.