Former Harry Potter child star Jessie Cave has spoken about turning to OnlyFans after her acting career slowed down.
The 39-year-old played Lavender Brown in the Harry Potter films as a teenager and went on to land roles in Call the Midwife and on the West End.
But the mother-of-four has now detailed how work started to slow down last year and she didn’t know where to turn.
In a new interview, Cave said she couldn’t afford to do a new degree and couldn’t get a job in a supermarket, because of childcare costs and fears of customers ‘shouting Harry Potter spells’ at her.
Describing it as a ‘point of complete desperation,’ Cave told The Times she had a ‘breakdown’.
In March 2025, she joined the mostly-explicit content sharing platform OnlyFans, with a viral first post that got her 3,500 subscribers.
Cave posts fully clothed ‘hair content’, in which she brushes her hair, which falls to her pelvis, while dressed as characters including Lavender Brown.
‘I thought I’d make five grand, be on it for a few months and it would buy me time to work out what we’re going to do,’ she told the publication. ‘But it’s now been over a year and a half and it’s genuinely saved our lives.’
What has Jessie Cave acted in?
Before scoring the Harry Potter role, Jessie Cave acted in the CBBC drama Summerhill in early 2008.
She landed Lavender Brown through an open casting call, beating 7,000 other girls for the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince part.
Cave has continued to notch several IMDb credits in the years since, including in Industry, Am I Being Unreasonable? and Black Mirror.
Her longest-running roles have been in the TV shows Buffering, an ITV sitcom created by and starring Iain Stirling, and the Sky sitcom Trollied, about a fictional supermarket’s staff.
She added: ‘My rule is the hair is the main character. That’s how I justify it. It’s literally about hair: the texture of hair. The fetish. It’s very, very niche.’
Cave said her subscribers pay $6 a month, with additional revenue coming from paid-for messages. She said that in one day, she made £15,000 and that in one year, she’s earned more than during her entire acting career.
Earlier this year, she underwent breast enlargement surgery, which she said her subscribers paid for and something she did in part because her hair ‘can only do so much’.
While Cave does not do explicit content, she said she does routinely get asked to do ‘gross stuff’ on the platform, which she admitted gets to her.
The actress also told the publication she suspects she will only have a limited time on the platform, given that performing explicit content is a line she will not cross.
However, said that she anticipates more artists will sign up to OnlyFans in the future. Kate Nash and Lily Allen have both previously admitted to turning to the platform to subsidise their music careers.