‘Harry Potter’ Alum Harry Melling Reacts to J.K. Rowling’s Controversial Transgender Comments

The Pale Blue Eye actor, 33, who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, was asked to weigh in on the subject of transgender rights during an interview with The Independent. Melling noted that while he doesn’t see himself as the “correct spokesperson” for the topic, he thinks it’s “very simple.”

“I can only speak for myself, and what I feel, to me, is very simple, which is that transgender women are women and transgender men are men. Every single person has the right to choose who they are and to identify themselves as what’s true to themselves,” he said.

“I don’t want to join the debate of pointing fingers and saying, ‘That’s right, that’s wrong,’ because I don’t think I’m the correct spokesperson for that,” added Melling. “But I do believe that everybody has the right to choose.”

Rowling, 57, came under fire in June 2020 when she appeared to support anti-transgender sentiments in a series of tweets. Though she denied that her views on feminism are transphobic, she doubled down on her controversial standpoints in a lengthy essay shared on her website days later.

Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint each spoke out against Rowling’s much-criticized remarks regarding the transgender community. Radcliffe, 33, stated definitively in a previous essay for The Trevor Project that “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,” Radcliffe wrote at the time.

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“According to The Trevor Project, 78 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth reported being the subject of discrimination due to their gender identity,” 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.”

Responding to backlash back in June 2020, Rowling wrote that she refuses to “bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.”

Other Potter actors have weighed in too, including Bellatrix Lestrange actress Helena Bonham Carter, who told The Sunday Times Magazine in November that she feels Rowling “has been hounded” and the responses directed toward her have “been taken to the extreme.” The actress, 56, added, “You don’t all have to agree on everything — that would be insane and boring. She’s not meaning it aggressively, she’s just saying something out of her own experience.”

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Jason Isaacs, who played Lucius Malfoy, told The Telegraph last January: “There’s a bunch of stuff about Jo. You know, I play complicated people, I’m interested in complicated people. I don’t want to get drawn into the trans issues, talking about them, because it’s such an extraordinary minefield. She has her opinions, I have mine. They differ in many different areas.”

“But one of the things that people should know about her too — not as a counter-argument — is that she has poured an enormous amount of her fortune into making the world a much better place, for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children, through her charity Lumos,” added Isaacs, 59. “And that is unequivocally good. Many of us Harry Potter actors have worked for it, and seen on the ground the work that they do.”

“So,” he added, “for all that she has said some very controversial things, I was not going to be jumping to stab her in the front — or back — without a conversation with her, which I’ve not managed to have yet.”