Cillian Murphy breaks silence on Harry Potter Voldemort casting rumour
Cillian Murphy has firmly shut down Lord Voldemort rumours. (Getty/Warner Bros.)
Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy has firmly shut down rumours that he is set to play Voldemort in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series.
The Oscar-winning Oppenheimer actor, 49, had been largely speculated to take on the role of the infamous Hogwarts villain in HBO’s controversial TV adaptation of JK Rowling’s wizarding novels.
Back in January, 28 Years Later star Ralph Fiennes, who played Voldemort in the original Harry Potter film franchise, added grist to the rumour mill, appearing to confirm that Murphy was set to take on the role.
“I’m told [my shoes] are already filled, aren’t they?” Fiennes said in an interview. “I’ve already said, I think Cillian Murphy is very good. He’s a very good choice.”
Fiennes first responded to rumours of Murphy’s involvement in 2025, praising the Irish star as a “fantastic, great actor”.
While it seemed set in stone that Murphy would be taking on the Harry Potter plum role, he has now definitively shut the idea down.
“I’m categorically not,” he said when asked in a recent The Times interview whether he is set to play Voldemort. “Can you make that the headline?” he asked, seemingly keen to make it known far and wide that he wouldn’t take on the role.
It’s not the first time the actor has had to shut the rumour down. In an interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2025, Murphy was asked whether there was any truth to the rumour.
“No,” he laughed. “I mean, genuinely… I don’t know anything about that.”
Online, fans of the Steve star have praised him for giving the upcoming reboot the cold shoulder.
“Finally an actor with a backbone,” one fan commented. “I’d also be p***** if people thought I would stoop that low as well,” a second wrote.
“Thank you Cillian,” a third wrote, alongside an emoji of the trans flag.
The cast list of HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter reboot is filling up, with Nick Frost, John Lithgow, Paapa Essiedu, Janet McTeer and Johnny Flynn set to take on major roles.
Each new actor to sign on to the project has been swiftly met with backlash though, due to the series having Harry Potter author JK Rowling on board as an executive producer.
For years, Rowling has been vocal about her ‘gender-critical’ views on the trans community. In 2025, she set up The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, a fund which offers “legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s and girls’ sex-based rights”.
The fund, which Rowling will support with her own income, was set up in the wake of the April 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling which outlined that the definitions of “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act pertained to “biological woman” and “biological sex”, thus excluding trans women.
Rowling had provided financial support to the legal case, which had been brought forward by ‘gender-critical’ group For Women Scotland.
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