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Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts
When Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts streamed on HBO Max on January 1, there was one noticeably missing member of the creative team: J.K. Rowling, the writer of the novels the movie series was based on. However, according to a new interview with Rowling, she wasn’t iced out of the special — it was her choice to not participate. Tl;dr: they didn’t fire her, she quit.
Or, more specifically, when asked about why she didn’t appear, on yesterday’s (August 29) episode of The Graham Norton Radio Show Podcast, Rowling explained she felt she didn’t need to do the special because it was more about the movies, than the books.
“Yeah, I was asked to be on that and I decided I didn’t want to do it,” Rowling said, as reported by CNN. “I thought it was about the films more than the books, you know, quite rightly. I mean, that was what the anniversary was about.”
To paraphrase a member of The Brady Bunch: Sure, Jo.
For those of you who have been living under a whomping willow, Rowling has come under fire in recent years for multiple — some might say, non-stop — anti-trans statements, that she has repeatedly tried to paint as “I’m just saying” type tweets and essays. Members of the Harry Potter cast have publicly spoken out about her statements, including Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Harry himself, Daniel Radcliffe, who published an essay with The Trevor Project, stating that “transgender women are women.”
Of note, Rowling was included in the special in archival footage from 2019, though did not appear in new sequences that reunited the cast and crew, 20 years later. On the other hand, the author did attend the world premiere of the third Fantastic Beasts movie (which she wrote the script for), and has recently released a new novel under her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, that reportedly details a YouTube creator who is doxxed for anti-trans statements.
Despite the eerie similarities to Rowling herself, the author swears that it’s all a coincidence.
“I had written the book before certain things happened to me online,” Rowling also told Norton, as reported by Rolling Stone. “I said to my husband, ‘I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,’ but it genuinely wasn’t. The first draft of the book was finished at the point certain things happened.”
One might perhaps start to think that Rowling is good at creating fictional narratives — at least, when it comes to her own life.