Harry Potter show 'won't secretly be infused with JK Rowling's anti-trans views'
The highly-anticipated TV series has hit headlines after announcing six main cast members, including John Lithgow as Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore, Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape, and Janet McTeer as Minerva McGonagall.
Luke Thallon will also be playing Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher Quirinus Quirrell, Nick Frost will take on the role of Hagrid, and Paul Whitehouse will be Squib caretaker Argus Filch.
Several fans of the original films, which starred Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, are planning to boycott the series after Rowling's comments about the trans community, which have amplified following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman.
Rowling, 59, has lost a huge number of fans and been involved in Twitter spats with several celebrities over her arguments, however, HBO's chief content officer Casey Bloys has now claimed the upcoming TV adaptation will not be 'secretly infused' with anything.
'The decision to be in business with J.K. Rowling is not new for us. We've been in business for 25 years,' Bloys said during an appearance on The Town podcast, when asked if he 'worries' about her transgender views.
'We already have a show on HBO from her called C.B. Strike that we do with the BBC.
'It's pretty clear that those are her personal, political views. She's entitled to them.
'Harry Potter is not secretly being infused with anything.
'And if you want to debate her, you can go on Twitter.'
According to Variety, at a press event last year, Bloys said that Rowling was 'very, very involved in the process selecting' the showrunner and director leading the Harry Potter series.
He also said that her anti-trans statements 'haven't affected the casting or hiring of writers or productions staff'.
A spokesperson for HBO added in a statement that Rowling's 'contribution' to the larger Warner Bros. Discovery company has been 'invaluable'.
'We are proud to once again tell the story of Harry Potter — the heartwarming books that speak to power of friendship, resolve and acceptance,' it continued.
'J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views. We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.'
In 2020, Rowling expressed her views on an article which referred to 'people who menstruate', questioning why the term 'women' was not used.
She then went on: 'If sex isn't real, there's no same-sex attraction. If sex isn't real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn't hate to speak the truth.
'The idea that women like me, who've been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they're vulnerable in the same way as women—i.e., to male violence—'hate' trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences—is a nonsense.
'I respect every trans person's right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it's hateful to say so.'
Her comments led to a wave of backlash with people branding the writer transphobic and explaining that it's not just cis-gender women who menstruate, while many who were once fans of Rowling's work saying they'd now distanced themselves from the author.
Meanwhile Radcliffe shared in a statement: ' feel compelled to say something at this moment. 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.'
He added: 'It's clear that we need to do more to support transgender and nonbinary people, not invalidate their identities, and not cause further harm.'
Watson shared on X: 'Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren't who they say they are. I want my trans followers to know that I and so many other people around the world see you, respect you, and love you for who you are.'
And Grint told The Times: 'I firmly stand with the trans community and echo the sentiments expressed by many of my peers. Trans women are women. Trans men are men.'
Stars including Bonnie Wright and Evanna Lynch have also spoken out in support of the transgender community.
Several members of the Harry Potter movie cast have been critical of Rowling's views on trans people including lead actors from the original films Daniel and Emma, while others like Miriam Margolyes and Ralph Fiennes have defended her. More Trending
Earlier this year, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav addressed the future of the Harry Potter TV show, revealing the intention for it to air for a whole decade.
'When we launch Harry Potter in a year, a little over a year, we'll have 10 consecutive years of Harry Potter, and be able to amortize that globally, around the world,' he said, according to sports media outlet Awful Announcing.
View More »
The drama is expected to launch in 2026 or 2027.
Got a story?
If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you.
MORE: I feel conflicted about Paapa Essiedu's latest move after joining Harry Potter
MORE: Inside Rupert Grint's private life after he announces 'secret' second baby with cheeky announcement
MORE: John Lithgow 'received message from friend with trans child' after Harry Potter announcement
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Inside 'And Just Like That' crisis talks… and the plot that destroyed all hope of a return
And just like that… the reboot of HBO 's iconic Sex and the City is coming to an end after just three seasons. The series finale of And Just Like That... will air on Thursday, August 14, marking the end of actress Sarah Jessica Parker 's journey as Carrie Bradshaw.
Wales Online
7 hours ago
- Wales Online
Jeremy Clarkson says farm faces ‘catastrophic' fail people should be worried
Jeremy Clarkson says farm faces 'catastrophic' fail people should be worried "That should be a worry for anyone who eats food" (Image: Amazon Prime Video) TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has provided insight into farming life and warned that this year's harvest "will be catastrophic". It comes after the former Top Gear star, 65, said bovine tuberculosis had been found on his Diddly Squat Farm last week. On Friday, in a post to X, formerly Twitter, he said: "It looks like this year's harvest will be catastrophic. "That should be a worry for anyone who eats food. "If a disaster on this scale had befallen any other industry, there would be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth." In response to a person in the comments section saying that drama makes good TV, he said: "Yes. But most farms don't have TV shows to keep them going." Asked if the farm would be able to survive without adjacent businesses like Clarkson's pub and shop, he said: "Not a cat in hell's chance." In another response, he said: "Normal weather would help. "It never stopped raining in 2024 and never started in 2025." Last Thursday, he wrote on X that a pregnant cow had contracted bovine TB on his farm near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. Cattle which fail a TB test, or animals that have inconclusive results for two consecutive tests, are classed as "reactors", and must be isolated and slaughtered. Asked in the comments of his X post about the prize bull called Endgame, which Clarkson bought recently for £5,500, he said: "His test was 'inconclusive'. "I couldn't bear it if we lost him." Bovine TB is recognised as a problem which devastates farm businesses and is mainly spread through close contact when cattle breathe in droplets of mucus containing Mycobacterium bovis bacteria exhaled from an infectious animal. Badgers can carry the disease and culling has long been a part of the Government response to the crisis, despite criticism from wildlife and animal welfare campaigners, such as Queen guitarist Sir Brian May. The Government said in June it will not be extending the badger cull and retains its commitment to end the practice before the next election. Oxfordshire is an "edge area" for bovine TB, meaning it is a buffer zone between high risk and low risk areas, so most herds are subject to six-monthly TB tests by default. The every-day running of Clarkson's farm is documented in a Prime Video series, which first aired in 2021, and brings to light common problems faced by British farmers. Article continues below Clarkson has become a vocal supporter of farmers and attended a protest in London against the Government's move to introduce inheritance tax on farmland in November 2024.
Times
8 hours ago
- Times
My 50 minutes with Sydney Sweeney, the pin-up dividing America
'I love real estate,' Sydney Sweeney said when we met in April, back when she was simply Hollywood's hottest bombshell and not the Republican Party's favourite pin-up. She owned a $6.2 million Bel Air mansion, a $3 million Tudor-style home in west Los Angeles, a compound in Florida Keys and a lake house in Idaho. And sports cars? Well, she bought so many she was running out of space to keep them: a 1969 Ford Bronco, a 1964 Ford Mustang, a 2024 Ford GT and a Range Rover. 'Each property has its own vibe,' said the 27-year-old actress, who rose to fame on the HBO shows Euphoria and The White Lotus. 'So it needs its own cars to go with the vibe.' But even as the words came out of her mouth she stopped herself, immediately worried about how she sounded. Her fame felt vertiginous. She shot a look at her (two) publicists. I suspect Sweeney knew all too well, even then, the consequences of saying anything that meant very much at all. For the past two weeks she has been the internet's favourite political talking point. The latest storm blew up when an advert for American Eagle denim, which featured the tagline 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans', triggered wall-to-wall debate as to whether this was a dog whistle for racist eugenicists. Next came the revelation that Sweeney was a card-carrying Republican, registering in Florida in June last year. 'Now I love her ad,' a fellow blond Republican with a passion for real estate, President Trump, said last week. 'You'd be surprised at how many people are Republicans.' To some, Sweeney is an attractive symbol of white 1950s-style Americana; to others, a provocateur who is in it for the cash. But who is Sydney Sweeney really? And what makes her such a lightning rod for pop-political debate? Sweeney was early to our interview by an hour (unheard of) when I met her in a Hollywood photo studio. I was thrilled — until I realised it was a reflection of her keenness to leave rather than her enthusiasm to arrive. A petite 5ft 3in, she sat with her legs folded, fidgeting with little boxes of make-up and often talking to her publicists on the other side of the room. She pulled as far back from me as she could. I could feel the height of her fresh fame acutely, her words put so carefully one in front of the other that it sometimes felt she was doing everything she could to sound boring. 'Privacy [is] huge,' she said. 'You don't realise how much that means until you lose it. I see all the time, 'Oh, they sold themselves, they knew what they were signing up for'. But 18-year-old me had no idea what she was signing up for.' • Read the original interview: 'I have to prove myself as a young woman' When it came to photographers, she found it 'crazy' that they were allowed to take photos of her at home. When it came to headlines, 'none of it's real'. And when it came to making friends, 'I've always been guarded', she said. 'Definitely more so now. You let few people in who you trust.' In fact, she exhibited such discomfort about being there for the 50 minutes — in order to promote a new movie as well as a number of brands — that it verged on annoyance. I suspect this wariness came from past experience, because this is not the first time she has ended up making political news. In 2022, when guests at her mother's 60th birthday party at home in Idaho were pictured wearing red 'Make sixty great again' caps, in reference to Trump's election slogan, Sweeney's blue eyes and bouncing blonde hair made her a pin-up for the American right. Prior to that, her boobs have been described as the 'harbingers of the death of woke', symbols that the left's obsession with political correctness and 'body positivity' was over and that we were back to the days of ogling old-school va-va-voom. I asked what it was like for her body to be so politicised. 'It's fascinating to see how I play a character that gets judged and thrown around and talked about because of her body,' she said, referencing Cassie in the teen drama Euphoria, the high school's popular girl, whom she said people perceive as a 'one-note dumb blonde, pull-your-tits-out kind of girl'. She added: 'And instead of having a lesson to the viewer they kind of mimic and shadow the exact same thing.' Yet it's also true that she has taken enormous financial advantage of her body, as an ambassador for Miu Miu, Armani Beauty, haircare brand Kérastase and Hey Dude, a trainer-slash-loafer company with a whole line of 'patriotic'-themed shoes. In June, in collaboration with the men's toiletries company Dr Squatch, she released 5,000 bars of soap ($8) apparently made out of her bathwater. In most of these adverts, Sweeney plays up to being a hot chick. 'I wear overalls more than dresses,' she said in a recent advert for Hey Dude, cowboy hat on, eyes sultry, hair tousled. For American Eagle, she speaks in a blissed-out vocal fry, lying on her front, back arched. And it works: Sweeney is now considered potentially the hottest chick in the world. But at what point does profiting from your body for its sexuality — 'because everyone else is!' Sweeney told me — end up perpetuating the same objectification you are angry about in the first place? It is a question the supermodel Emily Ratajkowski wrestled with boldly in her 2021 book My Body, which I mentioned to Sweeney. 'Mmm-hmmm,' she said. 'I'll take the power back.' In what way? 'You'll have to wait and see.' The main thing I was struck by was how keen she was to make money, largely motivated by her own upbringing. Sweeney was born in rural Spokane, on the Washington-Idaho border, her mother a criminal defence lawyer, her father in hospitality. Her younger brother, Trent, is now in the US Air Force. At 13 years old, Sweeney persuaded her parents — with a five-point business plan — to move to Los Angeles so she could pursue acting. They struggled financially. When she was 16, the family sold their home in Washington and moved into a Holiday Inn in Burbank, outside LA. They later declared themselves bankrupt. 'We were sharing a one-bedroom hotel room — no kitchen, no balcony. A pull-out sofa bed, where my dad and brother slept, my mom and me in the bed,' Sweeney told me. 'We'd run around the different hallways and find stairwells and make friends with all the staff.' This is the experience that still drives her: 'I just knew that I'd never allow myself to fail.' She started acting in 2009 when she was 12 and has appeared in more than 30 films since. This year she will have starred in three, as well as running her company, Fifty Fifty Films, which produced the rom-com Anyone But You. It starred Sweeney herself and grossed $220 million worldwide. Many of her other movies have been so gritty or gruesome you forget entirely how she looks on a red carpet: Reality, in which she plays former US intelligence contractor, Reality Winner, being interrogated by the FBI; Immaculate, a horror movie about nuns in a convent; and Echo Valley, a dark crime thriller in which Sweeney plays a young women throttled by addiction. She is a brilliant, bold actress. 'I will always want to work harder, achieve more,' Sweeney told me. She works six or seven days a week, sleeps for four to six hours each night and had last taken a holiday the year before we met. 'I love to work. There's 24 hours in a day, obviously, but I make sure that there's 26 for me.' It reminded me of similar comments by famous women who are open about being motivated by money and famous for making lots of it. In 2022, Kim Kardashian said the best advice for women in business was to 'get your f***ing ass up and work … It seems like nobody wants to work these days.' She was accused of 'richsplaining'. Discussing her own success, the British influencer and Love Island star Molly-Mae Hague was described as 'Thatcher with a spray tan' after she said: 'We all have the same 24 hours a day as Beyoncé.' These Instagram-ready celebrities are the pretty faces of consumerism, the women who have amped up their beauty and taken it to market. It is a gleaming example of late-stage capitalism, the newest iteration of American-dream Republicanism. Amid the furore over Sweeney, the Texas senator Ted Cruz declared: 'The crazy left has come out against beautiful women.' Welcome to America, where it's increasingly hot to be on the right — and the right is increasingly hot.
