“Wasn’t my cup of tea”: The Oscar-nominated actor who almost played Harry Potter
The rest of 2026 is probably going to be a bit of an ordeal for anyone who doesn’t like schoolboy wizards, authors who reside in Edinburgh with slightly dubious views and upper-middle class child actors from private schools, because the HBO Max reboot of Harry Potter will soon be upon us, or at least it will be by Christmas, which I’m classing as ‘soon’ because I like Christmas.
Even if that isn’t actually all that soon, this week saw the release of the first trailer for the big-budget series, which will be the first time that the lightning bolt-headed boy-genius will have been seen on any kind of screen since the movies wrapped up some 15 years ago with the Deathly Hallows Part Two.
It brought an end to a series of eight films starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson alongside a variety of classically trained British legends, and between 2001 and 2011, the films earned a staggering $7.7billion at the box office.
This time round, Potterheads are going to have even more to get hot under their cloaks about, because every single one of JK Rowling’s books will get its own series, meaning we’ll once again be watching a trio of well-spoken wizards navigate not just a Hogwarts full of trolls and three-headed dogs but voice-cracking and puberty as well.
As for the man himself, we’ve now had a first look at what Harry Potter will be like in the latest incarnation, Scottish actor Dominic McLaughlin taking his place under the stairs at the Dursley house before being plucked from obscurity by Nick Frost’s Hagrid. But we’re so used to Radcliffe as Potter that it might well take at least a couple of seasons until the transformation (sorry, JK) is complete.
Radcliffe however, was by no means a shoe-in for the role originally, with something like 40,000 hopefuls lining up before the first film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone began production, and as the casting director on that film Susan Figgis told Deadline, there was a battle between Britain and Hollywood going on behind the scenes that could well have ended up with Harry Potter informing Dumbledore that he sees dead people…all the time.
She recalled the push and pull between her preference to give Radcliffe the role and the US director Chris Columbus, who was keen to hand it to a more familiar face like Star Wars’ young Anakin, Jake Lloyd, or even The Sixth Sense’s Haley Joel Osment.
The row was enough to see Figgis eventually quitting over the disagreement, saying, “Christopher Columbus wanted to cast Americans, and that just wasn’t my cup of tea. I believed then, and I still believe now, that if you get the right people, you get the amazing film. With Daniel [Radcliffe] I just looked at him and thought, ‘God he’d be good’.”
And so it proved, Radcliffe, getting over some ‘interesting’ acting in the first film to go on to be one of the most iconic movie figures of the 21st century, getting better and better as the film series progressed and earning a rumoured $100m in the process. As for his successor, we shall see how he gets on, but the trailer certainly shows promise, and the likelihood is that McLaughlin wouldn’t have beaten tens of thousands to the job if the makers didn’t think he was up to it.
