Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel began his life outside of Harry Potter in 2012 by hijacking Top Gear’s Reasonably Priced Car, and tearing through the Oxfordshire countryside. He only slowed down for pedestrians, into whose ears he screamed the words to ‘Dancing Queen’, replacing the key choral line with “Charlie Sheen”. In the process, he recorded the show’s slowest ever time around their track, and, when interviewed, he loudly denounced Jeremy Clarkson as “an Early Learning Erkling arsehole”. He made air kisses at James May throughout. This episode, unaired by the BBC, remains a YouTube favourite.

He spent the remaining decade well and truly off the rails, in and out of jail. What he needed was a real life wand to conjure his way out of trouble. What he didn’t need was to complement his drunken October 2028 appearance on Patrick Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Saturday Night Hive by showing off his array of convoluted tattoos (including the words ‘face up ass down, Lavender Brown’ inscribed in Arabic on his lower back). Nor was he helped by his own lack of moral probity, and his demand to be “waterboarded with Butterbeer” in front of an audience of millions was televisual and social media gold. After this incident, Radcliffe was again admitted to rehab, where, at the time of writing, he remains.

But what of his acting career? Perhaps he buckled under the skull-crushing extremes of Potter-related pressure. Indeed, it will always define him and, following an awkward, if successful, second-run in Equus in 2012, the weight of expectation caused in him serious bouts of apodysophilia . Other than this, his only acting success was his post-rehab performance in 2026’s Cronenburgian body-horror How The Bacteria Learned to Multiply in which he teamed up again with Potter co-star Rupert Grint and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Radcliffe’s performance here contained more than a small dose of his own tortured interior life, and his demented recital of the 9 times table while trapped in an over-heated swimming pool filled with newly-birthed bluebottles remains a classic.

Emma Watson

Following her time in Harry Potter, Emma Watson attended Rhode Island’s prestigious Brown University, where she studied a vast array of liberal arts subjects, becoming to media eyes ever more like the character she was so famous for playing. While it became difficult for her to avoid confusing herself with her own doppelganger, Watson is known for her brilliant academic work and her political activism. Indeed, her harrowing 2016 anti-racism campaign for Amnesty International, which featured her naked with the word ‘Mudblood’ razor-bladed onto her stomach remains a defining image of 21st century popular culture. During this time, Watson announced her retirement from acting in a professional capacity, while she condescended to appear in several successful Brown productions, including Harry Potter: The Meta-Musical in which she played the androgynous ghost of Stephen Sondheim.

Excluding these activities, Watson has spent little time in the celebrity spotlight. Of course, some coverage was unavoidable, and images of her difficult and deeply public relationship with supermodel Coco Rocha, and her recent marriage to Russian advertising-and-oil billionaire Alexsander ‘Meerkat’ Orlov, have inevitably been ingrained into many of our retinas.

The latter arrangement was subject to semi-wild speculations in the glossier women’s magazines, However, in recent interviews in The Slum and facetious hipster Funt Mag, in which she appeared, shaven-headed, in an article called ‘The Skinhead Havisham’, she denounced these rumours as malicious. Instead, she is adamant that her marriage is hardly loveless, and that the couple are simply too busy to make public appearances together. She further maintained that she is perfectly content, fulfilled by her own blistering intelligence, her enormous library housed in the couple’s Gloucestershire estate, and her most dignified march towards middle age.

Rupert Grint

Rupert Grint remains the most psychologically stable of the ex-Harry Potter cast: a happily married father-of-four, he’s become a successful adult actor, famous for his playing Prince Andrei in the hypermodern epic War and Peace (Abridged) from back in 2015, and his multi roleplaying of various media persons in 2020’s What’s Meating Hosni Mubarak?

Of course, Grint will remain forever in our hearts and minds and coffee table books for his typically frazzled and nervy portrayal of Rudyard Kipling in Xam Namdlef’s How The Bacteria Learned To Multiply (2026). This particular performance earned him an Oscar for Best Actor and his typically gracious acceptance speech involved his tearful thanks to his family and to every one of his Harry Potter comrades for facilitating his rise to fame. Oddly, though, it included a deranged plea on the behalf of Daniel Radcliffe, that the ghost of Macaulay Culkin stops invading his daydreams, ensuring its entrance into the Radcliffe-Madness-Canon and YouTube infamy.

Certainly, Grint seems perfectly happy with his post-Potter existence, and his ability to stay out of the sharpest bits of media focus means that that profession’s dirtmongers find him dull. The public, of course, think otherwise, and Grint is also noted for rip-roaring guest appearances in TV shows like Rastamouse, in which he played Haile Selassie himself, and Spayzer: Son of Fraser, in which he played the Talking Beard of Sigmund Freud.