- - Harry Melling, “Harry Potter”'s Dudley, 'Never Wanted' to Be 'Shackled' to the Huge Franchise

Victoria EdelDecember 31, 2025 at 5:53 AM

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Harry Melling in 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'; Harry Melling in November 2025 -

Harry Melling opened up about how starring in the Harry Potter films has affected his career

Melling playing Harry's cousin Dudley Dursley in five of the films

Melling said he 'never wanted' to be 'shackled' to the movies, but that many people still associate him with them

Harry Melling found child stardom in the Harry Potter films, and he has some complicated feelings about that.

Melling opened up about his career in a Dec. 16 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The actor was cast as Dudley Dursley, Harry’s cruel cousin, in the Harry Potter movies when he was 10 years old. He ultimately appeared in five of the movies: 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2007’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and 2010’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1.

In the article, the interviewer noted that Melling’s roles are “Difficult to define,” which the 36-year-old star said was the “biggest compliment someone could ever pay me.”

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Harry Melling in 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'

“It’s always the space that I want to try and live in,” he said. “I don’t want people to know me. I don’t want people to have an understanding of me prior to — I mean, obviously I kind of f----- it up doing Harry Potter.” Laughing, he said, “But I really don’t want people to have an understanding of who I am going into a movie. I want them just to see the character, which is maybe why it feels eclectic and you can’t pigeonhole it.”

Melling said that even though he was a “wee babe” when he did Harry Potter, “people hold onto that.”

The interviewer asked Melling about comments he made to British GQ in November, where he said he feels like he’s spent his “entire life running away from” Harry Potter. He said he meant it in “a jokey sort of way” but elaborated, “to establish yourself so early as in this huge franchise — it was never a destination. At 10, or whatever, there was so much more to do.”

He said that even as a child, he knew “getting trapped within the child-actor thing” would limit the “other things” he wanted to do in his career. He said that now he does theater and movies on both sides of the pond, and, “I think maybe there was this engine underneath me, which was: ‘Keep moving, keep going, keep going. Don’t fall into it.’ ”

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Harry Melling (left) and Alexander Skarsgård in 'Pillion'

He continued, “Sometimes child acting can get a negative stigma. I just never wanted that to be me. I didn’t fall in love with being in Harry Potter. I fell in love with the concept of people being many things, and that’s the thing that I wanted to spend my life doing. That felt very precious to me and was something that I really wanted to have a go at doing in my life.”

Melling said that when he was a child actor in the Harry Potter films, he was “obsessed with theater.” He noted, “A lot of the more senior actors in the Harry Potter world were all these incredible stage actors — and I wanted to have that career.”

“But at the same time, Harry Potter is this huge, huge franchise, and I never wanted to be in any way shackled to it,” he said. “I always wanted to have a really big career and try lots of different things.” Ultimately, he said, he didn’t want to be most well-known for something he did when he was 10 years old.

“So it is a really interesting relationship you enter, when dealing with something as huge as Potter,” he said.

Melling starred in the 2018 Coen Brothers movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and had a key role in the 2020 Netflix series The Queen's Gambit. In 2022, he played young Edgar Allan Poe in the film The Pale Blue Eye. Now, he stars in Pillion, a queer comedy about BDSM with Alexander Skarsgård. Pillion will hit theaters in the US on Feb. 6, 2026.

A new Harry Potter TV series is in production, with child actor Amos Kitson playing Dudley.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”