Brushes with fame: Jessie Cave on her journey from Harry Potter to OnlyFans

Since Cave played Lavender Brown in the Harry Potter franchise 18 years ago, she’s written a bittersweet bestselling novel, Sunset, while maintaining parallel careers as an illustrator, actor, comedian and mother, but after a “particularly horrendous” couple of years complicated by deep postnatal depression, professional rejection and grief (following the deaths of a close friend, her husband’s father and her younger brother), her family found themselves living in a one-bed flat in London and struggling to survive. Cave couldn’t afford to take shop work, because it wouldn’t cover the cost of childcare, and she was becoming increasingly aware of how previous tabloid stories were impacting her ability to be cast in films.

Her Google search, she says, was horrifying to her. “Harry Potter actress raped by her tennis coach.” “Harry Potter actress brother electrocuted on railway.” “Harry Potter actress says Harry Potter ‘did nothing’ for her career.” “Harry Potter actress claims she was told she was fat…” The first things casting directors learned about Cave were the worst things that had ever happened to her. Professional rejections started to feel personal, like the time she had to cut short their first family holiday to audition for a role she didn’t get. Then one evening, out with a friend, while discussing the endless social media requirements of an artist working today, she realised that plaiting her hair on social media was the “least soul-destroying content” she could create. They wondered, idly, if there was any way to monetise that.

It’s estimated that up to half of us have a sexual fetish, often stemming from childhood experiences, and of those fetishes, trichophilia, being sexually aroused by hair, is one of the most common. Cave had grown her hair long since she was young. Not just grown it but cared for it, protected it, once mourned it. It hangs down to her hips, shiny, gold, straight. When she was 14 she was a promising tennis player, and then her coach groomed and raped her. He went to prison.

The following year, at 15, she was spotted in a Starbucks near her house in London and invited to be a hair model. It was exciting, an opportunity to wrench herself out of her current reality, to be an adult who would not be preyed upon by paedophile coaches. She was offered £500 to have a “long haircut” by the celebrity hairdresser Lee Stafford at a hair show in Nottingham. “On the train he said to me, ‘You’re a good little model, aren’t you?’” She shudders at the memory.

Backstage at a nightclub, she recalls, “People were doing champagne and coke, and they handed me a dress that was backless and some heels – I’d never worn heels. Then Stafford chooses me as his main model, and I’m kind of scared and want to please him. And he says to everyone with his mic on, ‘This is going to be the million-pound haircut.’ And before I know it he ties my hair up in a high pony and gets these huge scissors out, and when I flinch he whispers into my ear, ‘Don’t you fucking move.’” Her ponytail landed on the floor with a thud. She describes the experience as “hair trauma”, and she hasn’t cut it since. When she recently saw Stafford in the street, she wanted to scream.

At 19, she beat 7,000 other girls to the role of Lavender Brown, Harry Potter’s pure-blood witch, savaged by a werewolf in the battle of Hogwarts. Sporadic acting work followed, notably in Black Mirror, but Cave found a regular income from Harry Potter conventions. She loved them – meeting diehard fans, old friends. “You sign your photos, you have your chats. Not that different from what you do on OnlyFans.” But it didn’t last. “When that whole thing began with JK, it all changed – it became a different environment.”

In 2019, JK Rowling started speaking out on what she called “sex and gender issues,” and investing her Harry Potter fortune in legal funds for “women’s sex-based rights” while making claims such as “trans children do not exist”. Fansof her books responded with anger, feeling betrayed by what the International Quidditch Association (among others) described as Rowling’s “anti-trans positions”. Actors who’d starred in the films were expected to take a side, while those who signed up to the new series were condemned for laundering her politics. At conventions, Cave heard crowds boo whenever Rowling’s name was mentioned – the mood had shifted. “I went for a tattoo recently and my tattoo artist told me that they offer free removal of Harry Potter tattoos. It was around that time that I started to find the conventions scary. I suddenly didn’t want to be there any more.” With this income gone, Cave began to feel desperate.

In 2020, with widespread unemployment, a global shift towards home working, and a spike in bored and lonely horniness, the site saw a 75% increase in new creators. Lily Allen signed up as a foot model in 2024 – subscribers paid $10 a month for pictures of her pedicured toes. Despite having 8m monthly listeners on Spotify back then, Allen said she earned more from the 1,000 subscribers to her feet. That same year, musician Kate Nash said she made more money selling photos of her bottom on OnlyFans than from her concerts. In a campaign she called “Butts for tour buses”, Nash said her OnlyFans income would subsidise her live shows, because the music industry was no longer profitable for artists. Last year, aged 38, Cave joined them.

The family moved from the one-bed flat in London to a house in Liverpool, which, using OnlyFans cash, they slowly renovated, painting the walls green, pink and blue. Today the kids are at school and nursery, Brown is making tea and wrangling the puppy, a light rain glitters the patio outside. On the first floor, Cave’s office is a rich shade of tangerine: this is where she and Brown record their podcast, Before We Break Up Again. Every week the couple (whose first child was conceived during a one-night stand, and whose relationship has been a subject of both their Edinburgh shows) discuss such things as Brown’s “cancellation” in 2023 (after an old set resurfaced where he’d used the N-word while trying to make a point about racism) and his subsequent mea culpa, a show called Open Hearted Human Enquiry. It’s also where, for the past year, Cave films her hair content.

As I settle behind her desk she describes her week. “I have Wet Hair Wednesday, which is my biggest seller. I do Flash Fridays, which is usually slightly more risqué” – though she has never gone nude, and the most revealing shots have been a hint of cleavage. “And then I do Surprise Sundays, which is just always a bit mad. Those three days are the days you get paid.” I help steady a backdrop as she lugs in a plasticdressing-up box. Among colourful bits from her kids’ Halloween costumes are outfits subscribers have sent her: a black PVC dress, various negligees, “A lot of elf stuff. Elves are huge.” Some of the dresses, she supposes, won’t fit any more: her body humbled by the rearing of four babies, six weeks ago she had a breast enlargement, paid for with her OnlyFans income. Cave has many hundreds of subscribers now, including a truck driver, men in the military, a lawyer, and one self-described pirate. Part of her job involves messaging them daily, as if their girlfriend or a polite long-haired nurse. Her subscribers ask her to do things like dip her hair in a bowl of rice crispies, or wrap it around her waist like a belt. “No, sorry, no explicit stuff, but here’s a 47-second video of me washing my hair,” she’ll say. “No, sorry, I won’t show you the inside of my mouth or back of my throat.” “No, sorry, I won’t tell you what contraceptive I’m on, if I use pads or tampons… ”

Cave says it’s fine, and occasionally fun – it’s acting, she tells herself, and she enjoys the opportunity for vanity, the afternoons of being desired. But sometimes her mind drifts. She wonders, is she doing OnlyFans as a distraction because she wants another baby? Is she infantilising herself as a trauma response to her teenage sexual assault? Does she continue because she’s already earned more here than she has in her entire acting career, and can’t imagine going back?

“It just feels quite dangerous, when you start earning more from plaitingyour hair than acting. And then you do a film in the rain at night and it really makes you think about what you want to spend your time doing,” she says. There’s the risk, too, that soon she might have no choice. “You never know if certain roads are closed because of being on OnlyFans. Even though everything I do is ‘safe for work’, no one will ever know that. They’re just going to assume I’m doing porn!”

She pauses. “I’m really wary of using the word shame, but I’ve had to let go of a previous version of myself that was really clean, because now I’m in a world that’s just… not.” Cave was always told that her acting work would be limited by those Google results. “I was made to feel like I wouldn’t get jobs because of that search. And yet it’s nothing I’ve done. It’s all things that have happened to me.”

Cave’s mum loves it. Brown thinks it’s great. Her kids are respectful when the office door is closed. The longer she’s on OnlyFans, the more she wonders why other people aren’t. “Like, I really don’t understand why actresses are doing nude scenes and not charging extra for it.” Or why her friends online pose on Instagram in their bikinis, for free! “It’s crazy. My prediction is, soon they’ll all be charging. Actors can only be rejected a number of times before they break. And they will go on it because, increasingly, there’s no other way to survive.”

In her orange office, I pin up a floral backdrop while Cave erects a light and little pink tripod. She has been a sailor, she’s been a maid, she’s been Barbie and Ophelia, she’s been Lavender Brown, she’s poured custard through her hair. “So now I’m going to do a hair waterfall,” she explains, and tucks her hair into her top before slowly lifting it up and out of her collar so it plunges, fluid, down the frame. (This hair, by the way, my God – she lets me hold it for a little while, it’s like the mane of a lifesized My Little Pony, impossibly silky, thick, the colour of syrup.) Then there’s the “bun drop”, which she shoots in slow motion. Her topknot is released so her hair swings down across her face, her neck, her green T-shirt. We huddle over the photos on her phone. A selfie that would be tame for Instagram is, on OnlyFans, suddenly heavy with eroticism. “This is a teaser for Wet Hair Wednesday where you do see a bit more boob,” she says, scrolling past plaiting videos, ponytails, pigtails. Her inbox is full of messages from men wanting to chat (“Do you sext??”), but it’s half past three and the children have just come home and there’s dinner to think about.

Will all actors end up on OnlyFans? It’s not the maddest thought. The arts industry is in crisis. Young actors are discovering that unpaid work experience, zero-hours contracts and student debts make creative careers a mirage, and older ones are struggling with reduced funding, increasing living costs, the pressure to relentlessly brand oneself online. How to survive, especially when juggling care responsibilities? A report in 2025 found that 76% of people started sex work due to financial need – childcare responsibilities were a key reason. The English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) saw a 33% increase in calls to their helpline during the last six months of 2025, mainly related to women starting sex work due to the increased cost of living. There is a line between OnlyFans and sex work, and at its worst OnlyFans combines the sexual exploitation of porn with the economic exploitation of the gig economy. But increasingly it seems an understandable choice for artists (and mothers) for whom all other routes to stability have dissolved.

Cave has now been on OnlyFans for a year. She’s learned a lot. Notjust about how to make money, or what brand of conditioner looks themost, “umm, sexual,” but about herself, too. She went for a coffee with another creator the other day. “And I was trying to explain my reason for doing OnlyFans. I said, ‘It’s been really empowering as a mother of four,’ and she was like, ‘It doesn’t have to be empowering. You know, it can just be a job.’” Cave paused, her mouth hanging open. She felt suddenly…free. “Because, I really have worked atmy story, to try and explain myself to peers, people who, you know, do their Shakespeare shows. But no, I’m playing with my hair to make £50 so I can go to Asda. I’ve been really pretending that it’s been an empowering process. And it hasn’t been torturous, or traumatising. But it has been work.”

She puts her hair back into a messy bun and we clop downstairs where the children throw themselves on her gleefully and the puppy, taller than all of them, tries to join in. Cave assumed she’d continue the hair thing for a year, pay off some debts, take the family to Centre Parcs, but as the anniversary approaches she’s reconsidering. What she might do, she thinks, is build a huge shell out of papier mâché, and film herself inside it nude, her hair strategically placed, Botticelli’s Venus but with big glasses and a working history of Death Eaters. Then, live on camera she’ll shave it off, and start all over again.

Images: TCD/ProdDB/Alamy Stock Photo