Daniel Radcliffe has said that he isn’t ready to come back to the franchise to reprise his role as Harry Potter in a potential movie adaptation of The Cursed Child becoming a movie is an exciting one. Initially released in book form as a script, The Cursed Child went on to become a very well-received, Tony-award winning play, featuring new faces in familiar roles while also exploring the next generation of witches and wizards via the main characters’ kids.
It may be hard to imagine anyone but Daniel Radcliffe playing Harry Potter, but the actor has made it abundantly clear that he has no desire to return to the role that made him a household name anytime soon. Warner Bros. has said that they are still talking about a movie version of The Cursed Child, but Harry Potter’s Radcliffe and other actors from the original movies are hesitant to reprise their roles, and it’s starting to feel like the project maybe wasn’t meant to be after all. With the Fantastic Beasts movies underperforming, a return to more familiar faces seems like a good move, but if Radcliffe isn’t all in, the showrunners will need to consider how they’ll accommodate for his absence.
Just because Radcliffe is adamant about not returning to his role as Harry Potter at this point doesn’t mean that the show can’t still go on. Fortunately, other franchises have handled recasting their characters quite well, so there is precedence for how this can be done successfully. It’s also worth mentioning that the epilogue scene in Deathly Hallows Part 2 featured Radcliffe “aged up,” yet the whole bit came off as comical and the actors really aren’t that much older still. Not only this, but The Cursed Child play featured an entirely different slate of actors even though people like Radcliffe had stage experience, yet the production was still a wild success.
Recasting characters is nothing new. Though it was hard to imagine anyone besides Harrison Ford as Han Solo or Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, both roles were successfully recast in James Bond franchise has unapologetically cast six different lead actors since its inception with no sign of slowing down.
Deathly Hallows Part 2’s epilogue scene left a bad taste when fans got to see what Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, and Bonnie Wright all looked like “older" via make-up and costume. Though the actors are older now, they’re not that much older, so even attempting to age them up again would still be a challenge and it would need to be done with much more finesse than the first time around. Having Radcliffe come back to his role as Harry Potter so soon risks repeating the same “aging up” problem he encountered earlier, and that’s not good for him or the audience.
Every role in the stage production of The Cursed Child had been recast and the play did remarkably well, so there’s already evidence that someone else could successfully take on the role of Harry Potter. Although fans may be chomping at the bit to see Radcliffe and their other favorite Harry Potter actors come back to the silver-screen, The Cursed Child isn’t the place for this to happen, and that’s not a bad thing. Radcliffe hasn’t written off his breakout role entirely - perhaps he’s just waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.
