Harry Potter fans are rejoicing as Tom Felton reprises his role as Draco Malfoy in a new production—but there is one thing nobody can overlook.
Felton, 38, played Slytherin House’s Malfoy in all eight Harry Potter films, serving as a rival to the titular hero, and becoming a fan-favorite in his own right. And the actor himself has long been a fan of the JK Rowling-created franchise, regularly delighting fans in recent years by referencing the movies and even dressing up as his former character.
This year, Felton announced that he would be reprising the role in the Broadway production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which first found life on London’s West End in 2016.
It tells the story of the boy wizard’s own children attending Hogwarts, 19 years after the events of the book series, where Potter’s son, Albus, befriends Malfoy’s son, Scorpius, and the pair embark on a dangerous time-traveling adventure.
Until now, The Cursed Child characters had been played by completely new actors—until Felton announced earlier this year that he would be appearing in the Broadway production as the now-adult Draco Malfoy.
Now that Felton has returned to play the character, fans are pointing out an interesting detail—that the final movie predicted what Malfoy would look like 19 years later, and they got it just a bit wrong.
The final scene of the Harry Potter movies shows the cast of main characters sending their children to Hogwarts via the Hogwarts Express, and shows Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Malfoy 19 years later.
Each of the actors have been aged up, and would be around 36 or 37 years of age. Fans have previously joked about just how old the movies made these characters appear, and now that Felton is playing the character again, the difference has been made stark.
In a post to Threads on November 13, user @jenwgrieve shared a side-by-side of Felton playing an adult Malfoy in both the final Harry Potter movie, and on stage in The Cursed Child, and wrote: “What Warner Bros. in 2010 expected future Tom Felton to look like vs what Tom Felton actually looks like today.”
It received a big reaction, racking up close to 10,000 likes, as one user pointed out the real-life adult Felton looks like the character’s father, “which is kinda cool.”
Another agreed: “His resemblance, right now, with Jason Isaacs is stunning.”
A third, addressing the movies’ aging of the characters, commented: “All that CGI and they couldn’t make it look more believable.” One viewer agreed: “The aging in that scene was terrible. They just all looked tired and depressed.”
But another defended the film: “They had to make the aging super obvious cause the target audience were children.”
And as a third user summed it up, Felton had aged “like fine wine. Fine, fine wine.”
Felton’s debut on the stage in November came to huge applause from the audience—so much so that the production had to be paused, with all actors trying to ignore the commotion and stay in character, for several minutes as the crowd cheered on his return.
The actor made his first appearance in the theater production on November 11, and is due to stay in the role through to May 2026.
Newsweek has contacted Tom Felton via his representatives, and @jenwgrieve via Instagram for comment on this story.
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