Last week, the central trio of children for HBO’s upcoming, much-discussed Harry Potter television series was revealed. The kids seem perfectly amiable and doubtless very happy to get to play Harry and Hermione and the other one, and yet the news has been greeted cautiously online and in the media. The show comes at a time when the Harry Potter intellectual property, despite its continued commercial clout, has become fiercely politically contested.
The writer of the books, JK Rowling, is now perhaps just as famous for her “gender-critical” views, which she expresses with increasing forcefulness on X, making her the most high-profile figure in the so-called culture wars around trans identity. This skirmish shows no signs of abating, nor Rowling of letting up, which could prove problematic for the show and its cast and crew. Indeed, last month, the head of HBO took the extraordinary step of distancing himself from some of Rowling’s views ahead of the programme. One hopes that everybody involved in its production—but particularly the children at its centre—will have the mettle to weather any storms to come.
Of course, child-acting in general is an ethically difficult field, even if the Harry Potter series were not such a hot potato. Obtaining a child’s consent to appear in a film, without prior knowledge of what that experience will entail, is tricky; trickier still is the question of whether a child can meaningfully give consent to starring in a film or television series that will be set and shot over a number of years. It seems nigh-on-impossible that a child of 11 could predict how they will feel about being in the public eye, about being set on a path towards becoming a performer and having to deal with media intrusions throughout their youth and early adulthood. The actor Maisie Williams, who was signed up to Game of Thrones from the age of 13, has spoken of her experience of being bullied online and of her discomfort at going through adolescence in the public eye. In 2015—aged 18—while promoting the film Cyberbully, she told Digital Spy, “I get abuse from trolls every single day.”
Jake Lloyd, who played the young Anakin Skywalker, was monstered for his performance in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. “I’m still angry about the way [Star Wars fans] treated Jake Lloyd,” said Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, at Sundance Film Festival in 2017. “He was only 10 years old, that boy, and he did exactly what George [Lucas] wanted him to do.” Lloyd’s mental health struggles, which he ascribed to his acting career, are well known; he also stated that bullying in high school following the film’s release made his life hell.
In 2022, the former child actor Jennette McCurdy published a well-received memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, in which she detailed the abusive behaviour of her mother, coercing her into acting and exerting total control over her child’s life. Parents of child actors are often an issue in themselves: Macaulay Culkin, star of Home Alone, has alleged that his father was abusive; Judy Garland was put on drugs and overworked by her mother; Tatum O’Neal was punched and demeaned by her father, Ryan O’Neal.
Conditions have certainly improved for child performers since the days when Garland was hired by MGM and kept on her diet of amphetamines and barbiturates in order to make her energised and then sleepy at convenient times, and even since O’Neal, Drew Barrymore and Lindsay Lohan went through highly publicised struggles with addiction. Film sets are clearly not the same environments they once were; in the UK and the US, there are systems in place to ensure children don’t work too many hours each day and are looked after by chaperones. Haley Joel Osment, the Oscar-nominated star of The Sixth Sense, told the Guardian in 2020 that, although the popular narrative about child actors is one of blow-ups, “the percentage of people having a positive experience working as children is much higher than most people imagine”.
And yet the lifestyle is clearly not for everybody: working as an actor is still work, and earning money and promoting films and learning to live in the public eye come with challenges of their own. Meanwhile, infractions can still occur. If a child’s contract requires them not to work beyond a certain hour, but a whole film crew depends on getting a scene shot before the sun goes down, it seems unlikely that a child and their minder would be able to advocate for themselves against a director and powerful producers.
The first Harry Potter children have themselves had far from an easy ride. Daniel Radcliffe has spoken of using alcohol to cope with his fame from an early age; Emma Watson was up-skirted by paparazzi while leaving her 18th birthday party. Since then, the pair of them have had to deal with a different situation altogether—personal criticism from JK Rowling herself, who has disparaged them for speaking out about trans rights.
At the very minimum, children should be supplied with psychological support and given media training to help them cope with media coverage, their online presence and their role as collaborators in any cinematic endeavour. I would urge the parents of any children to seriously consider the ethics of allowing their charges to be associated with this environment; it seems unlikely that they can guarantee their safety. Allowing young people to enter such toxic environments, and possibly bear the brunt of ensuing public opprobrium, could be not far short of neglect.
