Daniel Radcliffe is a household name, there’s no denying that, and so is the character that made him famous, Harry Potter. But believe it or not, Radcliffe is trying to distance himself from the character in the eyes of one person: his two-year-old son, who has yet to connect him to the original films through the multitude of images out there of his father as the iconic protagonist.
“Does my son know who Harry Potter is? No, not yet,” Radcliffe told The New York Times in a recent interview. “Somebody gave me a DVD to sign recently, so it was sitting on our kitchen table for a couple of days, and at one point, he was next to it and I was just like, ‘Who’s that?’ — I’d see if he recognized me on the cover.”
But the actor’s young child didn’t make the connection, which gives Radcliffe some more time to preserve his son’s view of him. “He didn’t [recognize me], which is great,” he told the outlet. “For as long as I can just be his dad, and he won’t know me as anything else, I will maintain that for as long as I can.”
Interestingly enough, Radcliffe isn’t super interested in having his son — whom Radcliffe welcomed with girlfriend Erin Darke in April 2023 — watch the Potter films he starred in if he becomes intrigued by the series. In fact, he’d rather show him the upcoming HBO series and keep his involvement in the story in the dark. “Hopefully I can just put that on, and he doesn’t have to watch me in it,” Radcliffe explained. “That’d be, honestly, the ideal.”
That said, the actor would read the J.K. Rowling book series to his son, maybe because Radcliffe doesn’t have a direct tie to the novels like he does the films. “If he gets into them, I totally will,” Radcliffe noted. “But I don’t think I’ll nudge him toward them, because I don’t think I’ll need to — he’ll find them eventually.”
The upcoming HBO Harry Potter series is set to arrive on the network in early 2027, and you can currently stream all of the original Harry Potter films on HBO Max and Peacock.
Image credit: Warner Bros.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
