"Harry Potter" fans were thrilled to see Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint,
and Emma Watson reunite for the franchise's 20th anniversary special on HBO on New Year's
Day. The one-time special featured sit-downs with the three leads, as well as many other
fan-favorite actors across the series' eight films. The streaming event has been a long time
coming for fans of The Wizarding World, who have been calling for the cast to reunite for years.
“It’s lovely seeing you.”
“Yeah, this is surreal, isn’t it?”
The highly-anticipated large-scale reunion promised to give an inside look at the production
years later, and it did not disappoint! In fact, Radcliffe confirmed what fans
suspected all along about his time on the "Harry Potter" set as a young man.
He revealed that his fondest childhood memories happened on the Harry Potter
set — including his first brushes with romance. At the reunion, Radcliffe and his
co-stars reminisced about growing up behind the scenes at Hogwarts, with him sharing,
"Every part of my life is connected to Potter
and to [Warner Bros Studios] Leavesden. My first kiss is connected to someone here,
my first girlfriends were here. [...] Everything I can think of is that related right now."
Radcliffe said that he will always be happy to speak about his formative
years in the "Harry Potter" franchise. He added,
"I think people expect me not to want to talk about it. But that's
like somebody never talking about their childhood or teenage years."
Interestingly, Radcliffe told The Daily Post in 2007 that his first-ever smooch
didn't take place on the "Harry Potter" set. When discussing his character's first
onscreen kiss in "The Order Of The Phoenix," the fifth movie in the series, Radcliffe said,
"Certainly for me, my first kiss is a moment that
has stayed very fresh in my mind so it wasn't particularly difficult.
I was 14 when I had my own first kiss and, no, it wasn't on the Harry Potter set."
He added, joking,
"I don't think that mixing business with pleasure is a good idea… is it?"
“Well, that-thats j-j-just completely off the point.”
Perhaps Radcliffe was playing coy years ago. Though fans of the Wizarding World
have been clamoring for a "Harry Potter" reunion for over a decade,
Daniel Radcliffe is certainly in no rush. In 2020,
when asked if he'd be open to returning as the series' titular character, Radcliffe told Variety,
"​​I don't think so. I don't like [to] say no to things, but it's not something that I'm
rushing to do [...] I feel like those films have moved on and they're doing just fine without us.
I'm happy to keep it that way. I like what my life is now."
The actor clarified, saying,
“I'm not saying that I'll never go back into any franchise,
but I like the flexibility that I have with my career now. And I don't want
to get into a situation where I'm signed up for one series for years in advance."
In 2016, Radcliffe opened up about the struggles of childhood fame. He admitted to the Mirror,
"Ultimately, the hardest thing about growing up in the spotlight, it's not the easy access to
drugs or the strange, sort of pandering world you enter into. The difficulty is trying to
work out who you are while constantly coming up against a perception of yourself that everybody
else already has [...] it's very important, especially when you become famous young,
to work out who you are without fame... Fame does not last forever. For anyone."
When "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" came out in 2001, actors Radcliffe,
Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint were all just kids weaseling their way into their teens. However,
in becoming a worldwide box office phenomenon, the then-kids of "Harry Potter" were thrust
with the woes of fame from an early age. In January 2021, Grint, now 33, told The Times,
"Potter happened at such a young age and I found it hard to deal with the fame side of things. If
I ever do see Dan [Radcliffe] or Emma [Watson], fame is the one thing we never talk about."
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