Daniel Radcliffe has offered his latest words of support for the trans community while discussing Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s history of anti-trans comments in a new interview with The Atlantic.
“Obviously Harry Potter would not have happened without her, so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person,” Radcliffe told The Atlantic. “But that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.”
Rowling’s focus on trans people — specifically trans women — is a well-documented saga that often involves the author offering unsolicited comments on trans legislation and related dialogue. Last month, Rowling responded to a fan asking if she would ever “forgive” Radcliffe and his former co-star Emma Watson for speaking out against her views by saying they could “save their apologies.”
She continues to regularly post longform defenses of her beliefs, with her latest reading, “I do not believe that surgeries and cross-sex hormones literally turn a person into the opposite sex, nor do I believe in the idea that each of us has a nebulous ‘gender identity’ that may or might not match our sexed bodies.”
In 2023, Rowling even claimed she would be willing to do jail time over her transphobic views.
“It makes me really sad, ultimately, because 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 empathetic,” Radcliffe told The Atlantic.
Radcliffe first pushed back against Rowling’s transphobic beliefs in 2020 by penning a note released through the LGBTQ non-profit the Trevor Project. “While Jo is unquestionably responsible for the course my life has taken, as someone who has been honored to work with and continues to contribute to The Trevor Project for the last decade, and just as a human being, I feel compelled to say something,” he wrote. “Transgender women are women.”
Speaking to The Atlantic, he reflected on the moment, saying, “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. 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.”
In 2022, as Rowling’s comments continued in fervor and frequency, Radcliffe confirmed that “not everyone in the Harry Potter franchise” follows her line of thinking. By then, Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the franchise, had echoed his co-stars, saying, “I firmly stand with the trans community.”
Meanwhile, Radcliffe has earned rave reviews — and his first Tony nomination — for his work in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, in which he stars alongside Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.
