Rowling updates Potter

J.K. Rowling posts story on Pottermore website, with boy wizard turning grey

BEVERLYHILLS, CALIF. — J.K. Rowling’s latest Harry Potter update — an online post that sees the boy wizard grown up and going slightly grey — was so popular that it briefly crashed Rowling’s Pottermore website when she posted it Tuesday morning.

In Rowling’s new story, written as a gossip column dispatch from Potter’s Rita Skeeter in the Daily Prophet, the young wizard is now thirtysomething, married to Ron Weasley’s sister Ginny and showing “a couple of threads of silver” in his hair.

The tale, written as part of Rowling’s Quidditch World Cup series — a tie-in to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil — marks the first time Rowling has written about her characters as adults since the Harry Potter novel, Deathly Hallows.

Daniel Radcliffe, appearing via satellite from New York at the gathering of the Television Critics Association, shrugged off suggestions he might play Potter again in a film version, if it were made.

“He’s 12 years older than I am right now,” Radcliffe said. “I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that for a long time, I’m hoping.”

Radcliffe was promoting the Ovation drama A Young Doctor’s Notebook, in which he stars opposite Jon Hamm in a period tale set in Russia in 1918.

Rowling spokesperson Mark Hutchinson said there are “no plans” for a new Potter novel.

The 1,500-word online story describes Harry, about to turn 34, attending the final of the Quidditch World Cup with his family and old friends Ron and Hermione.

Skeeter notes Harry and friends are “no longer the fresh-faced teenagers they were in their heyday” and speculates about the state of Harry’s marriage to Ginny Weasley.

The story discloses that Ron runs the family joke shop, while Hermione is, literally, a high-flying civil servant, deputy head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.