Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe said that he wrote to 11-year-old actor Dominic McLaughlin, who has been cast in the title role of the new Harry Potter TV series.
Radcliffe appeared on Good Morning America on Tuesday and said: “I wouldn’t say that anyone who is going to play Harry has to [call me],” adding: “I wrote to Dominic and I sent him a letter and he sent me a very sweet note back.”
McLaughlin’s role in the Harry Potter series was announced in May, alongside that of Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger and Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley, after an open casting call. Producers HBO had previously said that John Lithgow would play Albus Dumbledore, Paapa Essiedu would be Severus Snape, Janet McTeer would be Minerva McGonagall, and Nick Frost would appear as Rubeus Hagrid.
Radcliffe said: “I do not want to be a spectre in the lives of these children. I just wanted to write to [McLaughlin] to say, ‘I hope you have the best time, and an even better time than I did – I had a great time, but I hope you have an even better time. And I do. I just see these pictures of him and the other kids and I just want to hug them. They just seem so young. I do look at them and say, ‘Oh it’s crazy I was doing that.’ But it’s also incredibly sweet and I hope they’re having a great time.”
Since falling out with Harry Potter author JK Rowling over trans rights and gender identity issues, Radcliffe has kept his distance from the new TV series, saying that he had no plans to be involved in it. He told E! Online in 2024: “I think [the producers] very wisely want to [have] a clean break. And I don’t know if it would work to have us do anything in it.”
The new series is due to premiere in 2027 and, according to HBO, will be a “faithful adaptation” of the books by Rowling, who serves as an executive producer. The eight feature films based on the books were released between 2001 and 2011, and the series has a similarly ambitious timeframe, with Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content, saying it would run for “10 consecutive years”.
