John Lithgow has reportedly resigned himself to the fact that he’s going to be asked about J.K. Rowling in every interview he gives for the rest of his life; the veteran actor has said as much in a recent talk with The New York Times. Lithgow notes in these conversations that he wasn’t aware of the controversy surrounding Rowling—who has taken a nosedive into both online and real-world transphobia over the last decade, including using her considerable Harry Potter wealth to fund anti-trans legal cases in the U.K.—when he first signed on to help make her wealth even more considerable with HBO’s forthcoming Harry Potter TV duplication. But he’s apparently now up-to-date enough on the topic to weigh in on the public perception of her views, and what he refers to as the author’s “imputed” bigotry against trans people.
This is per a recent appearance Lithgow made on The New Yorker Radio Hour, which served as a sort of double feature of art vs. artist discourse. (Lithgow is also fresh off of playing author Roald Dahl at the height of his public embrace of antisemitism in the 1980s in Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant; interestingly, he does not refer to Dahl’s antisemitic stances as “imputed.”) On the topic of Rowling, Lithgow has now adopted a position we’d describe as “disappointed hedging”: He says, of her various attacks on the rights and identities of trans people, that “I do disagree with much of it, much of it I think has been twisted and misrepresented, and she has doubled down on it at her own cost.” (The last, at least, is pretty hard to deny; Rowling’s response to pushback against trans-exclusionary views she made increasingly public in the late 2010s and 2020s has been to make the topic essentially her entire public personality; most recently, her reactions to the first trailer for the Harry Potter show were forced to exist online right alongside her cheering on the IOC for banning trans women from participating at female events in The Olympics, a handy encapsulation of the way her public cruelty is now enmeshed with the stories Lithgow is so quick to praise as “clearly on the side of the angels.”)
Interestingly, Lithgow also makes it clear that, if he considered stepping away from Harry Potter after the issues with Rowling were explained to him, he didn’t consider it very hard. “I was urged to walk away, and I was not about to do that,” Lithgow states in the new New Yorker interview. Citing his love for the part of Dumbledore, as well as basic realities of job security in his advancing years, the 80-year-old Lithgow concluded, “The reasons to do it were much, much stronger than the reasons to protest against what Rowling has done and said.”
