10 Things You Didn't Know About Harry Potter's Scar

8. Rowling Once Considered Making Its Fate Ambiguous

harry potter and the deathly hallows 19 years later
Warner Bros.

Most will agree that it would be super weird to imagine Harry without his scar, but if Rowling had stuck with her original ending to the final book, Harry's forehead may have been completely blank during his later years, after his defeat of Voldemort.

While appearing on Dateline to discuss the closure of Harry's story in The Deathly Hallows, the author was asked about the final word of the book. Originally meant to be "scar" (later changed to "well"), Rowling explained that she initially intended to leave the fate of Harry's signature lightning bolt up in the air:

"For a long time the last line was something like 'only those whom he loved could see the lightning scar', and that was a reference to the fact that as they were on the platform, people were milling around, but Harry was kind of flanked by his loved ones, so they were the only ones who were really near enough to see it, even though the other people were looking. And it also had a kind of ambiguity, so it was 'is the scar still really there?'"

She then explained why she ultimately decided to ditch this more ambiguous ending in favour of the one we can read/watch today:

"...but I changed it because I wanted a more... when I came to write it I wanted a very concrete statement that Harry won, and that the scar although it's still there... it's now just a scar. And I wanted to say it's over. It's done."

The scar is quite hard to make out in the 19 years later scene due to the aging makeup applied to Radcliffe's face, but if you squint, it's easy to spot.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!