Predictions: What’s Next for the ‘Harry Potter’ Kids?

Perhaps calling them “kids” is inaccurate, as most of them are in their twenties now, but let’s face it: We watched them grow up on screen, and because of that we’ll always think of them as “The Harry Potter Kids.” They’ve spent the past ten years– which, for some of them, is nearly half their lives– working on these epic films, and now that the release of the final film is less than a week away, I can’t help but wonder what’s next for these not-quite-kids. Some of them may continue to act; some of them may follow other pursuits while staying in the spotlight; and some of them may choose never to act again. Here are our predictions about what life after Potter holds for Daniel Radcliffe and company. Got other ideas? Tell us about them in the comments!

Daniel Radcliffe:
DanRad has been making interesting career choices as he’s gotten older; he knew from his experiences on the Harry Potter sets that he learns best on the job, so he’s forged crash courses for himself in both stage acting (as Alan Strang in Equus) and musical theatre (as J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying). Like many child actors who become known for one particular role, though, it will take some time for him to free himself from the identity of Harry Potter. I suspect he’ll choose a similar route to the one Elijah Wood took after the completion of The Lord of the Rings. Post-LotR, which Wood began shooting when he was 18, the Artist Formerly Known As Frodo Baggins made a concerted effort to resist typecasting: He appeared as a cannibal in Sin City, a panty-stealing weirdo in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and as the fussy and eccentric Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated. Between his theatrical pursuits and his next film project, an adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black, Radcliffe is already showing signs of this sort of shrewd career management; in The Woman in Black especially, he’s made a very conscious choice to step out of the role of child: He’ll have one of his own as the young lawyer and father Arthur Kipps. I’ll be interested to see what he ends up going for later on down the line. Hands up: Who wants to see Harry Potter play a serial killer? I do, I do!

Emma Watson:
Emma Watson will probably take over the world. Okay, I’m mostly joking, but kindasortanotreally. While she’s only just starting to branch out into other acting projects besides Harry Potter, she made a solid turn in a 2007 BBC television adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s novel Ballet Shoes and she’s currently shooting the long-anticipated film adaptation of the quintessential high school novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. She’s managed not to implode (no nude photo scandals besides the occasional wardrobe malfunction, no sex tape scandals, no substance abuse problems), and she’s pursuing higher education. True, she’s left Brown for the time being due to her professional commitments; but I mean, when you consider everything she’s got going on, can you really blame her? While she’ll probably continue to take on interesting roles in interesting films (she’s a smart cookie, so it’s unlikely that she’ll be going the blockbuster route), I actually have more hopes for her in the fashion world than I do in the acting world– she’s already become a major style icon and has been working with various brands in various capacities, and she’ll probably design her own line sometime soon, which will likely be classy and well-marketed. Go forth, I say!

Evanna Lynch:
Evanna Lynch will inadvertently invent a time machine while attempting to make a grilled cheese and will have all sorts of madcap adventures, which she will recount in her memoirs entitled Luna Lovegood Lives.

Rupert Grint:
I find Rupert Grint to be something of a puzzle. He had never acted before Harry Potter– not that that’s in and of itself a bad thing, as most of the kids were in the little-to-no-experience boat– but he’s spent the last ten years sort of just coasting along, riding the Potter train and putting out side projects here and there (which have generally been ignored by critics and audiences). He left school at 16 ostensibly to focus on acting, another thing for which I don’t blame him– it’s hard to maintain an actual school career along with a shooting schedule like Harry Potter’s– but going along with the whole coasting thing, he mostly seems to be following acting because he doesn’t really have anything else to follow. I wonder if eventually he’ll just get tired of showbiz and move on to something else. I hear he’s an avid unicycler; maybe he’ll run away and join the circus!

(Of course, I could be reading Grint all wrong; in fact, I’d kind of like to be proven wrong. What do you guys think?)