When Rupert Grint finished his last scene as Ronald Weasley, he knew exactly what he wanted to do next. It was July 2011, and the actor had wrapped up the eighth and final movie in the Harry Potter franchise, meaning he suddenly had no plans. It was a new feeling, as he’d been playing Ron Weasley since he was 11 years old. Even if his schedule was relentless, the films offered a satisfying locomotion to his life: Grint would work on a film, then go and promote it around the world, and then come back and work on the next one. But around the time of 2005’s The Goblet of Fire, the series’ halfway point, he started suffering intense tonsillitis. “While I was filming, there was never any time to get them out,” he says. “From Goblet to the end of the franchise, I was just ill. My tonsils were absolutely massive.”
The infected pads of soft tissue in his throat had come to feel like a weight around his neck – a byproduct of his demanding workload and a reminder that his time was not his to use. “They became a metaphor, really,” he says. “So as soon as I finished my work, I got them removed. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
It’s nearly 12 years since Potter ended. Afterwards, Grint ricocheted between roles: WWII fighter pilot (2012’s Into The White), punk-rock guitarist (2013’s CBGB), Stanley Kubrick’s agent’s cousin (2015’s Moonwalkers). For a young actor whose career had started with one, predetermined constant, the industry felt hard to navigate. “I hadn’t really prepared for it,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if I would even love being an actor. Ron drew me into the whole industry, and then he was gone.”
Grint saw the post-Potter years as an opportunity to start from scratch. Indies, comedies, “dangerous environments” where he had to think on his feet. Critics turned their noses up, but he was happy working. “I couldn’t see an obvious next step, so I just did anything in front of me,” he says. “I just wanted to get the passion back.” Alan Rickman encouraged him to try theatre, so in 2013, he starred in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo. In rehearsals, he was scolded by Butterworth for arriving late. “He took me to one side and said, ‘You can’t be late, OK?’ I realised it couldn’t be all me, me, me, in the sense that I couldn’t just do as I pleased. Just being 10 minutes late had a huge impact on everyone. There was pressure, which I’d rarely felt before.” Anxiety, too. “But I tuned into it, and tried to feed off it.”
These scattershot roles continued until 2018, when Grint landed a part on Servant, the Apple TV+ show produced by M Night Shyamalan. The psychological thriller is about a young couple, Dorothy and Sean Turner (played by Lauren Ambrose and Toby Kebbell), whose dead infant son seemingly comes back to life. Grint plays Julian, Dorothy’s alcoholic younger brother, wild and unpredictable in his pursuit of protecting his family. Grint liked that Shyamalan made him audition – something he is rarely asked to do. “I feel like I got it on merit,” he says. “That was a good feeling. Even if my American accent was ropey.”
Servant, currently airing its fourth and final season, became the biggest constant in Grint’s life after Hogwarts. The show brought him professional stability, plus critical acclaim, which he hadn’t known since the Potter days. It kept him working through the uncertainty of the pandemic, and his daughter, Wednesday, was born while he was making it in May 2020.
Shyamalan first met Grint when he was briefly attached to directing the first Potter film. “Rupert’s such a sweet human, and I find him very curious, because there's clearly darkness that he taps into when he works,” he tells me. “But he doesn’t let it escape like the rest of us do. He’s a bit of an enigma.”
Fans found Grint's transformation enchanting. Who knew he was a twisted little freak all along? It helped him figure out his next move, building on his success in the horror-thriller space and starring in Shyamalan’s upcoming film Knock at the Cabin. Grint plays Redmond, an unhinged redneck who sincerely believes the world is about to end. He is broad, unshaven, gaunt, and physically shakes with distress. The effect is almost like witnessing Ron Weasley emerge from a decade inside one of the internet’s most noxious echo chambers.
“In Cabin, he pushed himself even further,” Shyamalan says. “He does some really dark stuff, and to do that, it has to be in him somewhere.”
“It can be cathartic watching terrible things happen to other people,” Grint says. He cites the dark alchemy of Guillermo del Toro and the psychological distress of Kubrick’s The Shining as inspirations. Twelve years ago, his tonsillectomy offered him a personal liberation, and there’s a sense that now, playing the darkest roles of his career, Grint is facing a professional one, too. A freedom from the franchise, and fandom, that defined his early life – even if there’s part of him that still finds it hard to let go.
Grint and I meet in early January, over subway sandwiches and French fries in an East London gastropub. In conversation he’s something of a chatterbox, speaking in a low, deadpan voice that my dictaphone struggles to pick up. Although he is transparent about most areas of his life, he declines to discuss JK Rowling on the record. (“I don’t have anything else to add.”) Right now he’s anxious about an upcoming US talk show appearance. “I’m no good at stories. I can’t structure them.”
Many of his anecdotes lack a certain showbiz polish, but are better for it. Most involve a hapless protagonist (ie Grint) being undone by his own neuroses. There’s the story of Grint suffering from kidney stones last September: “One of the worst things I’ve ever experienced.” He thinks it was from a lack of hydration, but Nell Tiger Free, who plays the Turner’s enigmatic nanny Leanne on Servant, suggests it was self-inflicted.
“Rupert had a storyline where his character drank these leafy kale juices,” she explains. “What I love about him is if it says in the script ‘He drinks a pint’ of something, Rupert will drink the full thing in every single take. Apparently the surplus of those greens in your body can cause kidney stones,” she says.
After initially ignoring the weird pain in his kidneys, Grint went to A&E, where doctors used a laser to blast the mineral deposits into dust. Unfortunately, some fragments got stuck. “So they had to put a stent in my, er, urethra,” he says. “I was weeing blood for five days. I live in fear now that it will happen again.”
Free says she remains enthralled by the “whimsical, strange things” that happen to Grint. “You’ll mention a city and he’ll say ‘Oh yeah, I was once set on fire there,’ or, ‘That’s where I was attacked by a gaggle of geese.’”
There's his beekeeping: a passion that also terrifies him. An enthusiastic apiarist, Grint drove to Suffolk a few years ago to collect a box of bees he’d purchased, only for the polystyrene lid on the box to wobble open, allowing four bees to fly out and swarm the inside of the car as he sped down the motorway, unable to pull over.
“Now, I’ve developed a huge fear of bees,” he says. “I’ve never been stung, but the thought of this animal stabbing me is so disturbing. I dream about them.” He explains the “brutal” process of a bee removing its own sting, which it doesn’t know will kill it. “It sort of rips out their spine when they try to detach the stinger.”
Grint is drawn to hobbies big and small. In lockdown, he bought a miniature potter's wheel on Amazon, and made vases and teapots so tiny they were functionless. “You use your fingertips to shape the clay,” he says, demonstrating in the thin air between us. He draws, too. “Usually faces, people, disturbing cartoons, monsters. It always relaxes me. The dream is to do one to two [acting] projects a year, then spend the rest of my time doing dad stuff, or crafts.”
Cabin filmed during a seven-week production break on Servant – Shyamalan, Grint, and many of the crew decamped to a studio 10 minutes down the road. The film, adapted from the novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, is about a couple (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) who, along with their adopted daughter, are visited by four strangers while staying in a remote cabin. The visitors claim to have foreseen the apocalypse; to prevent it, the family must choose one of their own to sacrifice. If they do nothing, the oceans will swell and consume cities, planes will fall from the sky, and the earth’s population will perish.
“The scale of the threat was a kind of thrill,” Grint says. The theme of sacrifice for the greater good resonated with him, too. “Being a dad made everything different. I didn’t realise how monumentally life-changing it was going to be. So it gives an interesting perspective to the idea of sacrifice for your family.”
Shyamalan theorises that Grint is only able to go to the darkest places because of his family. “When I see him with his wife Georgia and his kid… they’re so beautiful and sweet. He became an actor during Harry Potter, and he grew up while everything was spinning around. Even to this day, the religion that surrounds that material; he’s still at the centre of it. You need to be anchored in order to withstand that.”
The pub is quiet on a Tuesday in January, but Grint is still an arresting presence. When he goes outside to vape, people stretch to get a look. He has a black baseball cap over his shaggy hair, and he’s broader now, too. But he’s unmistakable.
“It’s been like this since I was 12,” he says, when he returns. “I’m just so blasé about it now.”
“One of his charms,” says Potter co-star Tom Felton, who played series anti-hero Draco Malfoy, “is that Rupert’s almost forgotten the scale of the career that he’s had.”
I ask him if what Felton says is true. Does he forget the scale of the franchise sometimes? “Most days I think about the films in some way,” he says. But he’s really reminiscing about his youth, which just happened to be nestled within a global film franchise. “The only one I’ve ever rewatched is Philosopher’s Stone. And I enjoyed it. I felt detached enough, because it was so long ago.”
He describes rewatching the film as “like watching a home movie. It was my childhood, after all. I didn’t go to school; I lost touch with a lot of old friends. I missed out on a lot of shared experiences.” But he is still close with many of the cast. They’re in a WhatsApp group together, which Felton told me is called ‘The Potterheads’. “We’re still trying to figure out what life looks like on the other side of this massive cultural thing,” Grint says.
What has been hardest to navigate for Grint is the loss of so many cast members: Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane. Harris, who played headteacher Albus Dumbledore in the first two movies, was the first death Grint ever experienced. “I was 13, in a hotel promoting the second movie, when I was told. It was a hard thing to contemplate.”
He describes them as family: “Not parents, but uncles or grandparents. They all had this kind of subconscious presence in my life.” When Grint made his Broadway debut in 2014, in a production of the comedy It’s Only A Play, Rickman was in the audience. “And Robbie, losing him was particularly tough. He really was the most wonderful being.”
The result of having your childhood fused to one of the biggest film franchises in history is a sense of being caught between two states – Grint the person, for whom the film sets represent his most formative years, and Grint the professional, for whom Potter was just one of many jobs to come. I ask Grint if he attended Coltrane’s funeral, but he says no. “I don’t claim to know him outside work,” he says. Still, the bond between the young cast members and the adults was powerful. When Coltrane died in October 2022, Grint wrote a tribute on Instagram, calling him “A giant-hearted man who was still looking out for us, decades later.” “They weren’t the kind of people to sit you down and give you a formal talk, or dispense advice,” he says. “But I loved being around them and observing them.”
Grint’s daughter, Wednesday, is now two. Though Grint has bought her her first Hogwarts robes (“Gryffindor, obviously”), his attempts to introduce her to Ron have not been without their struggles. “I’ve shown her clips from Potter but I don’t think she understands it’s me. When she’s old enough, I’m looking forward to watching them with her.”
One day, Wednesday may see someone else entirely as Ron Weasley, and Grint is already bracing for the inevitable: the character he brought to life being recast. In the arms race between streaming platforms, intellectual property is the surest way to retain subscribers, and a Harry Potter reboot is all but a given. A popular rumour suggests Warner Brothers is already considering adapting the franchise for the small screen. “I’d love to see Harry Potter be adapted into a TV show,” Grint says. “I think it would really work. I’m sure the films will get remade, anyway.”
The next decade might be defined, then, not by how he moves on from the franchise that gave him everything (“I felt proud to have been in Potter,” he reminds me) but bracing for the franchise to move on from him.
I ask if that’s the final hurdle to moving on. “I think there’d be a feeling of passing the baton, letting someone else play Ron,” he says. He continues his thought as we leave the pub. “It’s weird because I’m protective over him, I could relate to him so much, and then I was picked to bring him to life. That’s hard to let go. But it would be nice to, as well.”
Grint knows nothing will come close to the scale of Ron Weasley. “I think I peaked, in terms of doing something that has such an impact,” he says. But the last decade has been about accepting that, not overcoming it. Earlier, he said he once wondered if he’d even like acting after the Potter movies. “And I do, but I enjoy that I’ve still got a lot more to do in that regard.” I ask him when he felt accepted by the industry for the first time. “I don’t think there was a moment where I felt like I was able to be ‘myself’ until I did Servant,” he says. “I’m still working on myself now.” Then he gets in his car and drives home, to the curios and tchotchkes – the ceramics, the drawings, the bees – that symbolise the thing he wanted years ago, when his tonsils had swollen to the size of lychees. Freedom.
Knock at the Cabin is out on 3 February
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Heather Hazzan
Styled by Michael Fisher
Grooming by Rheanne White at Tracey Mattingly
Set design by Hans Maharawal
