It was as if the redhead from Essex sprang from the earth ready to play Harry’s best mate, Ron Weasley. Grint—whose first big post-Potter honor was being part of the Olympic Torch relay before the London Olympics in 2012, an “amazing” experience he said he’d cherish forever— has acted primarily in British productions. Most notably he starred in The ABC Murders on BBC One, based on the Agatha Christie mystery, and the Sky One dark comedy Sick Note, playing an average Joe whose life perks up after he’s given a false-alarm cancer diagnosis but decides to let everyone continue to believe he’s still sick. (Lindsay Lohan was among his co-stars.) His movies have included CBGB, about the famed punk-rock club in New York, and the French comedy Moonwalkers. He currently stars on Apple TV+ in Servant, M. Night Shyamalan‘s supernatural mystery series, which returned for a second season.
“From the moment I got the part [of Ron], my life completely changed,” Grint told Radio Times in 2018. “It was a weird time and it has taken me a long while to process. Just being invisible can still be difficult. Sometimes you just want to go to B&Q.”
He also said, “After Potter I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had this feeling that I had missed out on normal things. I lost touch with a lot of my friends from school. I wanted to have a bit of a life again, so I took a break. I’ve never really been super-ambitious. I think there’s always been something in me, particularly when I finished Potter, that wants to prove myself, but I’m also naturally quite an insecure person anyway.”
Whatever he was doing worked. Shyamalan told EW.com about Grint, “He came in and auditioned, and I just saw a different person. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this kind of reinvention from child actor to adult actor in my life, it’s amazing.”
In May 2020, Grint and longtime girlfriend Georgia Groome welcomed their first child, daughter Wednesday G. Grint.