Tom Felton is playing Gandhi’s vegetarian friend, releasing new music, and still talking about Harry Potter

Tom Felton may not be as big of a name as some of his former Hogwarts classmates at this point, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t keeping busy. The Harry Potter star has been mostly dabbling in indie films over the past few years, but is making the jump to the small screen for the first time since 2018 in Gandhi, a bio-series following the life of the Mahatma.

In the series, Felton plays Josiah Oldfield, a cofounder of the Vegetarian Society of London, whom Gandhi befriends as a younger man while visiting the city to study law. (This version of the Mahatma is played by Pratik Gandhi—no relation.) The real Oldfield was partly responsible for Gandhi’s writing, as he was the first to encourage him to contribute articles to the Vegetarian Magazine.

“It is about the relationship between the two of them and how they found each other at exactly the right time. And how without meeting each other, their lives would have definitely been different,” Felton told Variety about the show. “Certainly, Gandhi’s would have been and therefore the whole world would have been a very different place.”

While he’s not filming on location in London, Felton is also exploring a music career that—if we’re being generous—probably won’t take off any time soon. If you’ve been missing all those early-aughts YouTube videos of white 20-somethings singing in their rooms with ukuleles, this might (might!) be for you. (Warning to former Draco girls: at one point Felton unironically sings the words “fudge this thing up.” It’s… pretty rough.)

[pm_embed_youtube id=’OLAK5uy_lN15mY2xTcFqx60j-Sa12fPDRrAjtqAmk’ type=’playlist’]In his Variety interview, Felton also took some time to address his Potter days, as he always seems to be doing. (The actor wrote a memoir called Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard in 2022.) “Even without the blonde hair, they still seem to recognize me. But quite delightfully, everyone that says ‘hello,’ is always polite, even to the bad guy,” he said. “I find it amazing that Harry Potter spread so far across the world, such as India and Japan. Everywhere seems to have known of it. Now there’s a whole new generation of Potter fans—a lot of fans that approach me are 13-14-15, and they weren’t even born when the first book was written. So to see it being passed down generation to generation is really cool. Something that I’m very proud of.”

While talking effusively about time spent within the Harry Potter franchise might not be the most in vogue right now, Felton did subtly distance himself from Rowling’s transphobia in 2022 (via The Independent), while still noting that “as much as Jo is the founder of [these] stories, she wasn’t part of the filmmaking process as much as some people might think.” “I mean, the obvious things to say are that I’m pro-choice, pro-discussion, pro-human rights across the board, and pro-love,” he said at the time. “Anything that is not those things, I don’t really have much time for.”