Daniel Radcliffe won't rule out playing Harry Potter again

Daniel Radcliffe said goodbye to playing The Boy Who Lived after 10 years and eight Harry Potter films, but with a grown-up version of the character now on stage in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the actor says he won’t rule out ever returning to J.K. Rowling’s iconic role.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the Deauville Film Festival, where he accepted the Rising Star award, the star of recent films like Swiss Army Man and Imperium weighed in on if he’d return if Warner Bros. ever sets plans for a Cursed Child film adaptation.

“I’m never going to close the door; that would be a stupid thing to do. But I think I’ll be happy enough and secure enough to let someone else play it,” Radcliffe said. “At the moment it’s not even a concern because I’m too young to play the character, but even in 10 years’ time I would still feel strange about going back to it.”

“There’s a part of me that’s like, some things are better left untouched. If we went back to Potter, there’s a chance we’d make what Star Wars: The Force Awakens was to the original Star Wars, but there’s also the chance that we’d make Phantom Menace,” he joked. “So I don’t want to go back to anything like that and maybe sour what people have already loved.”

Radcliffe also used the Star Wars analogy in another interview earlier this summer when asked about ever returning to the Harry Potter franchise. “It would depend on the script,” he said. “The circumstances would have to be pretty extraordinary. But then I am sure Harrison Ford said that with Han Solo and look what happened there!”

Radcliife also told THR he still has yet to see the play, which stars Jamie Parker as a grown-up Potter. Back in June, he said he planned to stay away from the London stage production “for the time being.”

“I want to see the show, I am genuinely intrigued and I hear it’s fantastic,” he said at that time. “I just feel like sitting in an audience that will, for the most part of the near future, be very enthusiastic Harry Potter fans might not be a… relaxing way to see a show. So, I guess, not for the time being.”