Daniel Radcliffe Said It's "Really Sad" J.K. Rowling Has Anti-Trans Views
Rowling recently tweeted she would not forgive Radcliffe.
After J.K. Rowling made a pointed statement about Daniel Radcliffe, the actor reiterated his disapproval of her transphobic remarks, adding that although the Harry Potter creator made him a star, “that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.” Radcliffe described his rift with Rowling as “really sad,” but stood by his previous statements in support of trans rights.
Radcliffe was asked about his relationship with Rowling a couple weeks after the author tweeted that if he ever apologized to her, she wouldn’t accept it. “It makes me really sad, ultimately,” Radcliffe said in an April 30 interview with The Atlantic. He confirmed he hasn’t had any direct contact with Rowling in years. “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.”
The actor reiterated the statement he made in 2020 when Rowling began tweeting transphobic screeds. At the time, Radcliffe stated on The Trevor Project’s website: “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 health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”
Radcliffe explained that he felt personally compelled to respond to Rowling’s messages. “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,” he said. “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.”
Radcliffe previously spoke about his decision to make that statement back in 2022, elaborating that he’d “met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter,” and he didn’t want them to associate the books they loved with any form of exclusionary speech.
