Draco Malfoy has refused to join the JK Rowling witch-hunt

I thought Draco Malfoy was supposed to be the evil one? Yet Tom Felton, who plays Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, said something genuinely courageous this weekend. He expressed his support for JK Rowling.

Felton was interviewed by Variety magazine at the Tony Awards in New York. He was asked what he thought of the Harry Potter author’s apparently controversial view that there is such a thing as biological sex. No doubt Felton was expected to publicly denounce Rowling and her campaigning for women’s rights. After all, his Harry Potter co-stars, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, have taken every opportunity to smear the great JKR as a bigot – and to express their support for letting children medically transition and letting men into women’s spaces.

Instead, Felton defended Rowling and thanked her for making his career:

‘I can’t say it really does [affect me]… The only thing I always remind myself is that I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world. Here I am in New York. And I have not seen anything bring the world together more than Potter, and she’s responsible for that. So I’m incredibly grateful.’

Felton is among the few Potter stars to have stood up for the embattled author. Another was Ralph Fiennes, who played Lord Voldemort. In 2022, he described her treatment by the great and the good as ‘disgusting’. ‘Rowling has written these great books about empowerment, about young children finding themselves as human beings. It’s about how you become a better, stronger, more morally centered human being’, he said. He also denounced cancel culture as ‘dumb’ because ‘it can’t work its way through the grey areas. It has no nuance.’

In the Harry Potter series, Voldemort is also known as the Dark Lord. He is a wizard so evil that no one dares even say his name. Malfoy, meanwhile, is a simpering poltroon whose family – a kind of wizarding equivalent of the Mitford sisters – disgrace themselves by joining Team Voldemort in the wizarding war. The fact that Fiennes and Felton have supported Rowling is an irony that the great author would no doubt appreciate. Their refusal to join the real-life anti-Rowling witch-hunt puts them firmly on the side of the good.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.