‘Harry Potter’ star Daniel Radcliffe on new J.K. Rowling project
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J.K. Rowling, the author who brought Harry Potter to life, launched a mysterious website Thursday counting down the days before a big announcement. The website has gotten Potter fans speculating about what might come next -- and with its name, Pottermore, it seems likely that it’s going to be related to Harry Potter. Yet even Harry Potter himself -- the man who plays him, that is -- is in the dark.
“I know nothing about that whatsoever,” actor Daniel Radcliffe told Hero Complex. “I’m sure that Jo will be writing a lot more in the coming years.’
Side note: He calls J.K. Rowling Jo!
Anyway, Radcliffe, whom Hero Complex reached in New York, where he’s currently performing on Broadway in a revival of the 1961 musical ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,’ was in the middle of a thought. ‘I’m sure she has a lot more in her than we’ve read and a lot more stories to tell,’ he said, adding with a chuckle, “As long as they don’t involve Harry, I’m quite happy to buy them.”
Not that Rowling needs Radcliffe or anyone else to buy her new books, really. In June, Forbes reported that she is one of only 14 women on the globe who are self-made billionaires. And she started out as a struggling single mom whose manuscript for ‘Harry Potter’ was originally rejected. Of course, all seven Harry Potter books went on to become international bestsellers. The most popular guess about what Rowling might be up to with Pottermore, when we asked on Twitter (follow @LATimesbooks), was that it might be some kind of Potter-oriented encyclopedia. Would that be a website or a book? Hard to say. Others have speculated/hoped that it will be some kind of a massive multiplayer online game. Some have parsed ‘Pottermore’ as an acronym; more obviously, EW reports that Warner Bros. trademarked the site as ‘providing multiple-user access to a global computer information network [...] on-line chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among users in the field of general interest [and] on-line facilities for real-time interaction with other computer users concerning topics of general interest.”
Two things to keep in mind: The trademark was registered two years ago, and Warner Bros. is Harry Potter’s film home, not his print fictional one.
The last Harry Potter film, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,’ officially opens July 15. Pottermore will be unveiled June 23. A representative for Rowling has stated that the project is “not a new book” and is not “directly related” to the coming movie.
And until then, it’s not clear what J.K. Rowling -- Jo, to friends -- has in store.
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-- Carolyn Kellogg
