Rupert Grint, the actor who outran Ron Weasley through horror and is now going back

Rupert Grint

Photo: Joella Marano at https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellasportfolio/ / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 24, 1988 Harlow, Essex, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Awards	Satellite Award · Young Artist · WhatsOnStage

Rupert Grint has spent most of his adult career in roles nobody could confuse with Ron Weasley: the hard-drinking brother in a haunted Philadelphia townhouse, one of four strangers who hold a family hostage at the end of the world, an Englishman coming apart in a Finnish forest. Then, at the end of this summer, the producers of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child posted a video of Ron’s sweater and a script with his name on it. “He’s a dad now, and it just seems like the right time to revisit him,” Grint told Yahoo. “And it’s probably my last time.”

That decision is the open question of his career. The boy who got the part by sending in a home video of himself rapping about wanting it has spent the years since the films ended building a body of work almost entirely in horror and dark comedy, away from the studio tentpoles that made him famous. Going back to the character, even for a limited run, tests whether that work changed how audiences see him or only postponed the reunion.

Grint was born on 24 August 1988 in Harlow, Essex, the eldest of five children of Nigel Grint, a dealer in racing memorabilia, and Joanne Grint. He grew up in Watton-at-Stone, Hertfordshire, and went to Richard Hale School in Hertford. His first stage credits came through a local theatre group, the Top Hat Stage and Screen School, which cast him as a fish in Noah’s Ark and as a donkey in a nativity play. He left school at sixteen, saying he “didn’t really like school that much.”

He had never acted professionally when he saw a Newsround report about the open casting for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. In August 2000 he was cast as Ron alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, and the film’s release in 2001 was his screen debut. It won him a Satellite Award for outstanding new talent and a Young Artist Award as most promising young newcomer. He played Ron in all eight films, ending with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 in 2011. Reviewing the first part of the finale, Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal wrote that “Grint has grown up to be a skilful actor who knows the value of a slow burn.”

He had started testing himself outside the franchise while it was still running. Driving Lessons, in 2006, put him opposite Julie Walters as a repressed teenager, and critics who disliked the film still singled him out. Cherrybomb premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2009 and then struggled to find a distributor until an online campaign by his fans helped secure a UK release. Wild Target, a 2010 comedy with Emily Blunt and Bill Nighy, cost about $8 million and earned about $3.4 million.

The tidy version of his story, the grateful child star who simply kept working, skips the years when very little landed. After the last film he made Into the White for the Norwegian director Petter Næss, played the punk guitarist Cheetah Chrome in CBGB and starred in Moonwalkers, films that reached small audiences. A biopic of the Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, with Grint attached, was cancelled in 2013, and a CBS comedy pilot built around him, Super Clyde, never became a series. Stage work went better: his debut in Jez Butterworth’s Mojo at the Harold Pinter Theatre won him the WhatsOnStage Award for best London newcomer, and in 2014 he reached Broadway in It’s Only a Play with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Off screen, the money from the Potter years came with its own disputes. Grint lost a tax case over a refund in 2019, and in November 2024 a UK tax tribunal ruled that £4.5 million paid to him through his company was income, leaving him with roughly £1.8 million more to pay. In 2020 he publicly said he stood with the trans community after J. K. Rowling’s comments on gender, a distance from the author that makes his return to her character more than a nostalgia booking.

Television gave him the range the films had not. He starred in and executive produced Snatch, a series spun off from Guy Ritchie‘s film, in 2017, and played opposite Nick Frost in the black comedy Sick Note the same year. In The ABC Murders, in 2018, he was Inspector Crome, the young officer who sneers at John Malkovich’s ageing Poirot. The turn that stuck was Julian Pearce in Servant, the Apple TV+ psychological horror series produced by M. Night Shyamalan, which ran for four seasons from 2019 to 2023. Shyamalan then cast him as Redmond, one of the four intruders, in Knock at the Cabin in 2023, and Guillermo del Toro’s anthology Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities used him in its 2022 episode Dreams in the Witch House.

This year he went further into the genre. Nightborn, the Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s film, released in Finland as Yön lapsi, competed in the main section of the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Grint plays Jon, an Englishman who moves with his Finnish wife, played by Seidi Haarla, to her childhood home in the forest, where she becomes convinced that something is wrong with their newborn. He has said the story mirrored his own fears as a father, and he made it after learning he was expecting a second child. Reviews split: Sight and Sound found the film overstuffed, while others praised the warmth he brings to Jon. Shudder released it in North America in July, and it opened in Finnish cinemas on 6 November. A week later, on 13 November, Paramount releases Ti West’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, in which Grint plays Bob Cratchit to Johnny Depp’s Scrooge, with Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley.

Grint lives on an estate in Hertfordshire with the actress Georgia Groome, his partner since 2011. Their daughter Wednesday was born in 2020, and when he joined Instagram that November with a photo of her, he reached a million followers in four hours and one minute, a Guinness World Records mark at the time. A second daughter, Goldie, followed in 2025. As a boy he wanted to be an ice cream man, and he later bought a van with his Potter earnings. He supports Tottenham Hotspur.

His next date is fixed. From 2 February to 30 May 2027 he plays Ron at the Lyric Theatre in New York, a 17-week Broadway engagement that begins a month after Tom Felton ends his run as Draco Malfoy. By his own account it is the last time he will wear the sweater, and this time it is a role he chose rather than one that chose him.

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Tags: actors, M. Night Shyamalan, harry potter, Ti West, Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, Rupert Grint

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