(Photo via the “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” Facebook.)
NEW YORK (AP) | Rupert Grint — the original Ron Weasley from the “Harry Potter” movies — will slip into his old role on Broadway next year in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”
Grint, who starred in all eight “Harry Potter ” movies from 2001 to 2011, will join the play at the Lyric Theatre from Feb. 2 to May 30, 2027.
It will mark the second time a member of the “Harry Potter” film cast has joined the stage production. This year, Tom Felton reprised his role of Draco Malfoy, seeing box office receipts jump.
The news follows years of anti-transgender rhetoric from “Harry Potter” creator J.K. Rowling, detailed at length here via GLAAD. Her positions have led some LGBTQ+ and ally fans to distance themselves from the franchise and caused original actors to speak out for trans rights.
In addition to titular actor actor Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger, that included Grint.
“I firmly stand with the trans community,” Grint told The Times in 2020. “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. We should all be entitled to live with love and without judgment.”
“Ron Weasley has been a part of me since I was 11 years old and I can’t wait to meet him again in this stage of life,” Grint said after his return was announced. “There is something so full-circle and so special about stepping back into Ron’s shoes now when we are both fathers; it is somehow both very familiar and completely new.”
The play picks up 19 years after the end of the final novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” An adult Potter is married to Ginny Weasley, sister of his best friend, Ron, who married brainy Hermione. Both couples have children and all are in danger again. Ron runs his own joke shop, Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes.
“His return creates a powerful bridge between the story audiences first fell in love with and the story of family, legacy and the passage of time that ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ carries forward,” producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender said in a statement.
The play teased his return via social media as well:
Grint made his Broadway debut in the original production of “It’s Only a Play,” opposite Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. He made his West End debut in Jez Butterworth’s play “Mojo,” starring opposite Ben Whishaw.
