By Robert Nesti

British theatre commentator Mickey-Jo (Mickey-Jo Boucher) is one of the most opinionated and fast-growing voices on theatre across Broadway and the West End. His YouTube channel is a lively, informed source for takes on what’s current in both cities, and popular having recently passed the 100,000 mark in YouTube subscribers. He is also queer, engaged to Aeron James, whom he refers to as his “stagey fiancé,” and who is often seen alongside him at events, including the recent Olivier Awards.

And politically queer, as a recent video makes clear. In it, he takes aim at the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans campaign and why audiences and influencers should boycott Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, currently running in London’s West End and on Broadway in New York.

Follow The Money

Mickey-Jo is careful to acknowledge that a boycott is unlikely to threaten Rowling financially. Nor is it known what her current financial stake is with the show. His argument is more following the money’s flow: ticket buyers to producers to Rowling, especially when considering what causes she spends her money on.

As he puts it: “A proportion of money from the show’s vast profits goes to her, and she spends some of her money by creating funds to support legal campaigns against the trans community, one of which was recently successful here in the United Kingdom.”

One such instance is the legal victory in the UK Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling under the Equality Act 2010 that legally defines a “woman” based on biological sex. It is case Rowling helped finance through her donations to For Women Scotland and she celebrated the ruling publicly on social media, posting that it had “protected the rights of women and girls across the UK.”

He also points to a more immediate policy consequence: “In June of last year, a campaign with the explicit, overt financial support of J.K. Rowling saw the British Parliament enact policy banning trans people from using public bathrooms that reflect their gender identity, insisting that they must instead use gender-neutral bathrooms or those reflecting their biological sex.” He adds: “The deliberate exclusion of trans people from single-sex spaces is an effort to try and eradicate them from public life.”

And while some defend Rowling as a champion for women’s rights, Mickey-Jo dismisses that argument: “Has J.K. Rowling, this champion of womanhood and women’s rights, had much to say about the restrictions to abortion rights in the US? No. She’s too busy tweeting about the Olympics.”

Follow The Tweets

Rowling’s public anti-trans shift has escalated over years, from what her team once dismissed as an accidental “like” to a sustained, well-funded ideological campaign.

It began in 2018 when she was criticized for liking a tweet that referred to trans women as “men in dresses.” Her spokesperson called it a “clumsy and middle-aged moment.” But in December 2019, she publicly defended Maya Forstater, a researcher whose contract was not renewed after she made anti-trans statements, including claiming that the idea that trans women are women is a “literal delusion” that no one should be compelled to accept. The following year, Rowling went public with her gender-critical views in a lengthy personal essay, prompting the stars of the Harry Potter film series — Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint — to publicly affirm that trans women are women.

Rowling did not stop there. In 2022, she founded Beira’s Place, a sexual assault crisis centre in Scotland that explicitly excludes trans women, and published The Ink Black Heart — a novel critics read as autobiographical allegory about a creator wrongly accused of transphobia. She also targeted trans gaming journalist Jessie Earl on social media for suggesting a boycott of Hogwarts Legacy, sharing Earl’s tweet to her 14 million followers and accusing her of “purethink,” effectively prompting a harassment campaign at her.

In 2024, she told an MP to “fuck off” in a public social media dispute about gender-critical politics, and separately mocked adult Harry Potter fans — saying they should be “over” the books by now, as they were written for children. And most recently, she mocked International Asexuality Day as “International Fake Oppression Day.” Mickey-Jo notes the widening scope with dry precision: “I use the entire acronym because she also weirdly had a lot to say about asexuals the other day, for no reason whatsoever.”

He isn’t the only person or organization calling Rowling transphobic: The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association’s 2021 annual review specifically cited Rowling by name as a prime example of anti-trans rhetoric causing “serious damage” in the UK.

Follow The Grosses

But why call for a boycott on a show that has been running a decade in London and eight years in New York? A bit of Cursed Child history:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was developed by Jack Thorne from an original story by Thorne, J. K. Rowling, and John Tiffany. It is set 19 years after the conclusion of the final novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and, according to Rowling, was developed as a stage play instead of a novel because “it is the only proper medium for the story.” The finished play was divided into two parts, requiring two viewings and running five-hours-plus. It opened in London in 2016 to huge critical acclaim, winning nine Olivier Awards including Best Play. The New York run opened in 2018 at the reconfigured Lyric Theatre. The New York Times estimated the cost to open its Broadway engagement at $68,000,000, the most ever for a non-musical. It also opened to rapturous reviews and won six Tony Awards, including Best Play. Both the London and Broadway runs closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic. The London run reopened in the two-part format. The Broadway production in a condensed single-part format in 2021, and was later shortened again to reduce costs and appeal to tourists.

In recent years, the Broadway edition was struggling: the production posted a $3.5 million operating loss in the year ending February 2025.With that in mind, the producers chose to stunt cast. Enter Tom Felton, the actor who played Draco Malfoy in all eight Harry Potter films, who joined the cast on November 11, 2025, as the first actor from the original film franchise to appear in the stage production. The effect was immediate. The show became a box office phenomenon, jumping by roughly $1 million per week in grosses from its previous baseline, consistently ranking as the top-grossing production on Broadway. It set a house record of $3.7 million for the week ending December 28, 2025 at the Lyric Theatre. Because of the turnaround, Felton’s run has been extended through November 2026. According to Broadway Journal reporting, producers privately forecasted approximately $70 million in sales over Felton’s engagement, with operating income earmarked to offset prior losses and rebuild reserves rather than distribute profits to investors.

Mickey-Jo does not credit this as an artistic triumph. “It’s kind of a casting moment that makes everyone involved look a little bit desperate. I feel like it makes the Broadway show look desperate. Certainly, I feel like he looks desperate as an actor for reverting to this role in this franchise . . . (H)e returns to the only role that he has ever been able to gain any kind of credible success or awareness for playing, while Daniel Radcliffe, also on Broadway right now, wins Tony Awards and performs in plays that celebrate the beauty of the human experience.”

Radcliffe is currently starring in Every Brilliant Thing, a solo show at the Hudson Theatre, through May 24, at which point Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay steps into the role for 40 performances, making her Broadway debut.

When asked about the Rowling controversy by Variety, Felton said he was not particularly “attuned” to it and that it did not impact his work. “The only thing I always remind myself is that I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world and I have not seen anything bring the world together more than ‘Potter,’” he said, expressing gratitude to Rowling for creating the franchise. Notably, unlike the three leads in the film franchise, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, did in 2020, Felton has yet to publicly distanced themselves from Rowling’s views in 2020.

Don’t Follow the Influencers

Why is Mickey-Jo speaking out now?

He explains that he stayed silent for months after Felton’s casting was announced, not wanting his platform, with some six figures of subscribers, to inadvertently drive ticket sales. But the volume of content from others eventually made that silence feel untenable.

“I have become so exasperated by the number of different professional Broadway outlets who are capitalizing on his casting, his opening night, his multiple extensions in the role, putting out all of these different reels, getting great engagement, getting all the likes, getting all the clicks, setting up backstage vlogs, doing all of these things, really making a moment out of it.”

More frustrating to him than the professional outlets are the Broadway-adjacent influencers who identify as allies to LGBTQ+ communities, yet attended the show, produced monetised content around it, and promoted it to their audiences. “I am seeing a bunch of Broadway and Broadway-adjacent influencers — some of them friends, most of them acquaintances — wilfully disregarding the impact of the profits from the stage production on the trans community worldwide, and choosing to still go and create content around the show.”

Some of those influencers offered, in his view, “cursory little trans charity support in order to cover their bases.” Others argued they were protecting the livelihoods of cast and crew. Mickey-Jo dispatches that justification directly: “It’s not just a question of them deciding how to spend their money — which I’ll remind you, they’re not spending. This was an influencer activity. It’s actually about them profiting off of the entire experience by creating monetized content and promoting the show and helping it to garner more ticket sales by contributing to the marketing.”

“Don’t have the nerve to call yourself an ally and then behave like this,” he adds.

All this from a man born 1n 1995 who grew up with Harry Potter. In the video he remembers dressing as Harry Potter for school World Book Days, and feeling the “feverish excitement” with each new book installment. That has passed.

“I no longer find it possible to hear about Harry Potter, to certainly watch a film or to really experience the IP in any kind of a way without the sensation of vomit rising in my throat. And it’s a real tragedy of childhood nostalgia that that is now the immediate physical response that I have to the thing.”

And he closes with a punch: “There is such a tangible line between your ticket, the money that you hand over at the box office, and actual harm that is being exacted on the trans community — which, like so many other things in society right now, is going to get considerably worse before it begins to get better.”

Watch Mickey-Jo’s video below: