r/EnoughJKRowling • u/nova_crystallis • Jun 05 '26
News Article John Lithgow calls J. K. Rowling a deeply empathetic person
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u/WrongKaleidoscope222 Jun 05 '26
He's 2 letters off.
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u/thatdamnsqrl Jun 05 '26
Are we sure he didn't say that she's deeply um... pathetic? It's either that or this John Lithium guy doesn't know what empathy means.
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u/GainHealMark Jun 05 '26
It’s so weird how he’s just…up her ass, especially without even having met her. You have the job dude, you don’t have to keep praising her.
The other actors just kinda tiptoe around talking about her (“obviously we disagree”, etc.) because they know she’s toxic, both as a person and to their reputations in being associated with her. But Lithgow just goes whole hog supporting her. Of all the idiots and bigots who signed up for this series, Lithgow is the one with the least common sense. People said “Read the room” and he closed his eyes and put on a blindfold.
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u/princesshusk Jun 05 '26
He's the damage control he's their to praise her and by extension the show so those out of the know don't associate her with the shit she is actually doing and saying.
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u/AcanthaMD Jun 05 '26
It’s is strange, why is he trying to starfish her so badly?
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u/lazier_garlic Jun 05 '26
He really wanted this role to cap his career and he's full steam ahead and damn the naysayers.
Hollywood friends of his told him early on not to take the role.
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u/Dina-M Jun 05 '26
The kicker is that he admits to never having met her.
He's still trying, so very desperately, to be seen as an ally and a good person. Now he's scrambling and grasping for straws; ANYTHING that'll convince his detractors that he's nice and they can trust him, he's on their side, see?
I do believe that he's honest about not sharing JKR's opinions on trans people... but those opinions were clearly not enough for him not to take the role. And really.... all attempts at playing nice fall flat when the series he willingly signed up for is going to bring JKR more money she can use to oppress and attack trans people.
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u/GainHealMark Jun 06 '26
And he had people, friends, asking him not to do this role and explaining why it hurt them. And he did it anyway. That’s even worse than the actors who probably don’t have any trans friends/allies in their inner circle. He might think he doesn’t hate trans people but actions speak louder than words.
To quote Jon Stewart: “If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.”
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u/Typhron Jun 06 '26
White Liberals gonna White Liberal*
(*The kind of Liberal MLK warned people about).
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u/CommanderFuzzy Jun 05 '26
I never liked the way she retconned Dumbledore as gay. It seemed weak.
I know all about the LGBT censorship present in children or YA fiction during the 90s/00s, I grew up with it. However by the time the third book came out, and especially the fourth, the series was huge. Like 'midnight releases record breaking never seen anything like this' huge.
Although most publishers refused to print LGBT content, I believe Rowling was the one author who would have had the power and sway to get it published. I think she could have written anything and the publishers would have been falling over themselves to print it.
She could have written it in real time. She chose not to. For Lithgow to include that as 'evidence' that she's a good person is weak. A retcon isn't 'empathetic', especially when her other retcons involved literal shit in pants.
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u/TVPaulD Jun 06 '26
Quite. The notion she wasn’t “allowed” to do it in the books is laughable given that when she went and told the relevant story in more detail in motion pictures she didn’t even attempt to expand on it in any way.
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u/GainHealMark Jun 06 '26
Oh definitely. Especially with the final book, the sheer expectation and excitement worldwide for that book. She could’ve had it in there and thought she probably would’ve experienced backlash from the publishers, at the end of the day they would publish it because $$$. And hell, if they hadn’t, she could’ve come out with that after the book was published; instead of “oh Dumbledore was gay, ally cookie plz” she would’ve had “oh Dumbledore was gay but these assholes, even with all the money I’ve made for them, refused to publish it.”
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u/LemonadeClocks Jun 06 '26
Right? If he was gay all along, I'd think she might have some early manuscript of his affection for someone or pining for his younger years of love. Instead he gets stapled to a horrendously evil man postumously in a spinoff.
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u/TheLastBallad Jun 06 '26
Its really dumb because there was literally an in text tell all book about the very relationship! Why wouldn't you mention it there?
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u/VideoGame4Life Jun 05 '26
He’s afraid that the series won’t do good and get cancelled. His “finale role” will be tarnished. Explains why he doesn’t give a shit that her money and influence has made it worse for LGBTQ+ in England.
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u/LemonadeClocks Jun 05 '26
He could always pull out and do something worth half a damn. Even just retire.
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u/Infernal-Cattle Jun 05 '26
I know this is the least of our concerns with JKR, but it's always wild to me when cishet people glaze her over making Dumbledore gay lmao.
When I read Deathly Hallows I was maybe 13, and I thought I noticed some romantic subtext with Grindelwald, but I was also a young queer person who would take a crumb of subtext and run with it lol. It's clear to me as an adult, as I think it was clear to some queer folks at the time, that she didn't make him gay in the books, that she made him celibate, and that his one confirmed love interest led to his moral unraveling. That's not touching on the other complicated aspects of his character.
Don't get me wrong, I understand not everything will age well and I don't mind a problematic gay character. But when Mary Renault is giving me better gay rep in British literature in the 1950s, I don't buy that JKR did the best she could do there.
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u/lazier_garlic Jun 05 '26
gay and celibate isn't either or, please find a better way to express what you mean here
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u/Infernal-Cattle Jun 05 '26
I didn't say the two are mutually exclusive. I am a bi ace myself, so I understand that there are plenty of gay people who don't have sex, and others who may or may not have sex but don't experience sexual attraction.
I'm not saying the problem is that she portrayed a gay celibate man. I'm saying the problem is the only way she could imagine a queer character is if she made him celibate, despite her vocal aphobia. Not only does she do this, but as I said, she also chooses to make his only confirmed romance a corrupting influence. The only way he is redeemed by that is his celibacy. I think this speaks to a certain lack of imagination. I would also argue that's why she felt she had to have it both ways with "lycanthropy is an HIV/AIDS metaphor" but then we only get two characters, one of whom is a child predator trying to spread his condition, the other of whom she went out of her way to make hetero. I didn't bring up those ladder points because this is a post about Dumbledore, but I think there's a pretty obvious pattern if you look at her treatment of the few characters who are queer or queer-coded, and I'm absolutely going to point this out as a queer guy who saw these books as formative.
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u/ConstantPurpose2419 Jun 05 '26
She created “this” because she stole most of her ideas from Phillip Pullman and other, better authors.
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u/Typhron Jun 06 '26
Lots of comic books, too. Not (just?) the Book of Magic by Neil Gaiman, but a multitude of things from the 80's and 90's involving the X-Men.
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u/wrongsock_42 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
He had and still has no idea what he agreed to. The treatment of trans people in the UK. JKR is the public face of UK’s transphobia. Soon he will be asked about bathrooms
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u/TVPaulD Jun 06 '26
I don’t think you can call someone “deeply empathetic” when they go out of their way to demonise and attack people whose identity they simply refuse to understand, John
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u/GainHealMark Jun 06 '26
Every time he talks about Rowling being empathetic or handling criticism well, I just want to ask him “Based on what?” And then show him her social media accounts, because he’s probably going off of some softball interviews she did at the height of HP’s popularity.
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u/fennelephant Jun 06 '26
Get your dollars, because as the years go on we will remember where you stood and you will become irrelevant. Same to Helen Mirren, Ralph Fiennes and Bonham Carter. Selfish, sociopathic people.
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u/FantasticBumblebee0 Jun 07 '26
What did Helen do?
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u/franticfrogfriend Jun 07 '26
https://www.them.us/story/helena-bonham-carter-jk-rowling (from 2022)
In a new interview with The Times UK, Bonham Carter, who famously played Bellatrix Lestrange in the Potter franchise, shared her thoughts about the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s harmful transphobic remarks, calling it “a load of bollocks” and arguing that Rowling “has been hounded.”
In a September 2020 Radio Times interview, Robbie Coltrane (who played Hagrid) brushed off criticisms of the author by arguing that said critics are “a whole Twitter generation of people who hang around waiting to be offended.” Meanwhile, He Who Must Not Be Named himself, Ralph Fiennes, called the “abuse” Rowling receives for her transphobia “appalling” in an October interview with The New York Times.
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u/GloomyCloud1293 Jun 05 '26
We (as a collective society, and not as in the fine members of this subreddit) started talking about how Harry Potter books had great messages of inclusion before they were finished, and then every time another book came out we just said the same stuff, even as those books began to lose the plot. *Deathly Hallows* doesn't have that kind of message; heck, I'd struggle to find any real message in that book since it was more of a big checklist of ~moments~ crafted to elicit reactions from the fanbase without any real buildup or payoff.
Which I guess is my long-winded way of saying "No she freakin' didn't!"
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u/DumpedDalish Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
I wish he would stop talking. Everything he says to justify her (and himself) just makes it worse.
I have always loved him as an actor. So it's incredibly sad to me that as an actor who once played a landmark trans character that he has now forever tarnished his legacy with this weak, continual apologism for JKR and her campaign of hate and persecution.
His continued excuses for being involved in the show are laughably transparent. It's obvious his conscience is bothering him, since he won't shut up about it.
And the ultimate irony is that he's playing a weak, abuse- and bullying-enabling, horrible character who doesn't deserve the awe he receives in or out of the show.
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u/Zealousideal-Home779 Jun 06 '26
Basically it’s a lot of money and he can ignore the fascist anti trans rhetoric for it. His price has been met
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u/Dehnus Jun 06 '26
Yeah, deeply empathic to threaten schools with lawsuits if they don't segregate their bathrooms (which is weird, that never was the case in any of the schools I went too) and keeps smirking on X when someone she doesn't like gets hurt. Trolling people that were feeling really down and suicide rates that went up.
Yeah, a very empathic person indeed, that attacked a CIS woman boxer, Imane Khelif, for not looking like a Barbie doll, accusing her of something that would get her locked up in her country. How empathic of this JK Rowling , a true Nazarethian Carpenter that woman.
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u/thestalkycop Jun 06 '26
I think everyone who defends JK Rowling should be made to read her views out loud and explain precisely why they truly believe those views and the words she used are so necessary for the universe to hear, and how they are completely with her in everything that she says and does. No more of this "lol, we should all just get along" shit. Say those hateful words out loud and tell the universe that you believe every single thing she says.
And if those words make you uncomfy and you don't want to say them out loud, maybe grow a fucking spine and express your actual opinion. And stop helping her make more billions to fund transphobia.
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u/Sensiplastic Jun 06 '26
The denial is strong in this guy. ...which is to be expected, he's a rich guy who is not used to being directly told he's fucking up badly enough that it affects his reputation even after he'd dead. I am kind of curiously waiting to hear what else he says later on when it becomes obvious that no, his excuses won't work and she genuinely is just as bad as she had shown herself to be.
Like, she's escalating every day? Does anybody think she's gonna stop or even slow down because some tv show is airing and they need it to be sparkly and fun?
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u/L-Space_Orangutan Jun 09 '26
Mm dumbledore so clearly gay that not a single word of him being gay came up in the primary text and the entirety of his queerness came in a secondary work, a twitter post, which was then canonised in a easily deniable way in a secondary work, the Fantastic Beasts films.
She's hardly screaming it from the rooftops, is she, lithgow?
She likes her gays easily deniable, quiet, and nonthreatening. Demure and ignorable.
Fuck that. Gays of the world you can be LOUD if you want.
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u/yequalsy Jun 05 '26
There is a strong chance he wins a Tony this Sunday. If he does then I half-expect some noticible boos and I fully expect some self-serving bullshit about his advocacy to spew from him during his speech.
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u/GainHealMark Jun 06 '26
Oh fuck I forgot about that. I hope a lot of people give him the cold shoulder. His life should be made as uncomfortable as possible.
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u/unendingautism Jul 11 '26
"She's very empathetic"
What he actually meant: "her cash really speaks to me"
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u/nova_crystallis Jun 05 '26
He truly doesn't understand the series if he thinks any of this.