How Daniel Radcliffe Really Felt About His Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire Hairstyle

There are a lot of reasons why "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is one of the more controversial movies in the series (although it performed pretty well in /Film's official ranking of the franchise.) It's a film that struggles hard to fit its 750+ page source material into a single movie, and it's the one where Ron comes off looking like a total jerk. One of the biggest complaints, however, is something far more petty: what's going on with the hair?

Almost every male character in this movie has long hair for seemingly no reason. It would be one thing if it was just Harry, whose book counterpart had a well-documented tendency towards long messy hair, but why Ron? Why Neville? Why the Weasley twins? (Only Seamus and Dean were spared from the trend.) And more importantly, why don't they have hair this long in any other movie? "Goblet of Fire" begins in 1994 — was there something going on that year in British culture that could've led to this? Were all the nation's barbers on strike?

The actual reason for the change was far sillier. As Daniel Radcliffe (who played Harry) explained in the 2021 "Return to Hogwarts" documentary:

"My one bone to pick with [director] Mike Newell is that every year when we left for the film ... they said 'don't cut your hair over the summer. We'll cut it when we get back and we'll decide what we want to do.' And me and Rupert [Grint] both dutifully grew our hair for months and then came in. He [Newell] was like 'oh yeah, great!' And we were like 'no, you're not leaving us like this? We're supposed to be becoming teenagers and dating girls in this film. That's [pointing to hair] not what it's going to be, is it?' So I think we were pretty devastated as we realized that it was."

Radcliffe's story actually differs a bit from a popular rumor about the movie. The story usually goes that the director was simply not aware that the kids were told to grow their hair out over the break, and that it was his job to decide on a new hairstyle for them. I've always been confused by that explanation — seems like the whole problem could've been solved by some basic communication from one of the hundreds of people involved in the production — which is why Radcliffe's version of events feels more believable. It makes more sense that Mike Newell simply preferred long hair. 

Aalthough Newell thought the actors' hair looked great, Rupert Grint (who played Ron) shared Radcliffe's sentiments. "My hair in film four is one of my biggest regrets," he said in a 2021 podcast interview. "Shoulder length, I had my hair down here, and I was like 'I don't know.' I think everyone actually had a phase of kind of having this really long hair." 

That last sentence captures a common defense of the "Goblet of Fire" hairstyles: a lot of guys with typically short hair do often have a phase where they grow it out, so it's fitting that there'd be that one year where Harry and Ron go through that phase. 

You can also make the case that the long hair mixes well with the looser, carefree times the gang is in for most of this movie. The rest of the "Harry Potter" movies are defined by the rise of returned fascist Voldemort, whose reign of terror coincides with the return of much shorter, conservative-coded hairstyles for all the main characters. It feels like "Goblet of Fire" is capturing the vibes of the freewheeling '70s while the much darker "Order of the Phoenix" throws everyone into the stricter, shorter hairstyles of the '50s.

The other defense of the "Goblet of Fire" hairstyles is that the long hair helps disguise the aging of the actors. There's a reason why so many actors playing high school characters are styled with a similarly long, bangs-heavy haircut: it helps cover up the actor's maturing hairline. Even if a guy's not balding, it's very common for their hairline to recede upwards a little in their early adulthood. This is often one of the clearest indicators of a guy's age as he transitions from mid-teens to early twenties, and it's the main thing a stylist would want to cover up.

It's no surprise that it was only with "Order of the Phoenix" that the jokes about Harry getting old really started to take off in pop culture. The short hair in "Phoenix" called attention to the fact that Radcliffe was now noticeably several years older than his movie counterpart, a fact that became increasingly hard to ignore as the franchise went on. It wasn't a big deal of course — the kids' aging on "Stranger Things" today is far more awkward — but it definitely helps redeem the long "Goblet of Fire" hairstyles. 

That long hair may have looked a little awkward and messy, but it's come to represent a lighthearted, more childlike time in the characters' lives. Like most elements of the early "Potter" films that the later movies did away with, it's hard not to look back on the long hair fondly.