In 2022, Jason Isaacs told The Telegraph, “I don’t want to get drawn into the trans issues, talking about them, because it’s such an extraordinary minefield.”
He added that J.K. Rowling “has her opinions, I have mine. They differ in many different areas. But one of the things that people should know about her too – not as a counter-argument – is that she has poured an enormous amount of her fortune into making the world a much better place, for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children, through her charity Lumos. And that is unequivocally good. Many of us Harry Potter actors have worked for it, and seen on the ground the work that they do. So for all that she has said some very controversial things, I was not going to be jumping to stab her in the front – or back – without a conversation with her, which I’ve not managed to have yet.”
In 2025, he told Vulture he’d only met J.K. Rowling “once for about two minutes”.
“People want me to talk about J.K Rowling’s attitude to trans people all the time,” he said. “And initially, I went, ‘I don’t know her well enough, and I’m a straight white man in late middle age, and it’s not for me to opine on feminist and trans issues.’ But then I championed this fabulous trans comedian, Jordan Gray, and wrote about her, and I suddenly became a poster boy for trans rights. It was interpreted as me putting the knife into Jo, and it wasn’t. I don’t understand who she is on Twitter. But then that’s true of almost anybody online. It’s a place where people scream abuse at each other. And I’ve heard her arguments when she explained herself in that seven-part podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K Rowling, which I listened to. She says in that something like, ‘I may be on the wrong side of history, but this is what I feel very strongly.’ It’s not my argument or discussion to have. But if there’s a vote, I know which side I’ll be voting.”
