Harry Potter Actress Jessie Cave Made More In One Year of Hair Videos Than 18 Years of Acting

Jessie Cave, who portrayed Lavender Brown in the final three Harry Potter films, says making videos of herself brushing and styling her hair on OnlyFans for a year has made her more money than her entire acting career.

“I’ve earned more, easily, than my entire acting career within one year,” she told The Times in an interview released on August 7th.

Her page is $6 per month and doesn’t feature any sexually explicit material. Cave remains fully clothed in most of the videos, sometimes dressed as a maid or an elf, brushing, braiding, or tying back her long hair, which has already garnered attention on her Instagram. Her earnings come mostly from paid messages where her subscribers request a certain style or sound.

“My rule is the hair is the main character,” she told the paper, calling the audience “very, very niche.”

Besides being an actress, Cave is also a comedian and writer. She joined the platform in March 2025 after a string of audition rejections, which she called “a point of complete desperation.” A rejection after a callback was the last straw.

“I had a breakdown, and I thought, ‘That’s it with acting, I give up,'” she said. “But, also, we have no money.”

Her expectations were low. “I thought I’d make five grand, be on it for a few months,” she said, adding that the account was supposed to buy her some time until she figured out what to do next. According to her, she earned about 15,000 pounds, around $20,000, on her first day.

A year later, she says it has “genuinely saved our lives.”

Cave and her husband, comedian Alfie Brown, are raising four children. She said regular employment wasn’t an option for her because childcare costs would take away all her salary. Besides that, her fame would follow her everywhere, adding that she didn’t want people shouting Harry Potter spells at her while working at Tesco.

She announced the account in a comedy video on Instagram in March 2025, promising subscribers “the best quality hair sounds” and saying the goal was “just very sensual stuff with my hair.” On her podcast “Before We Break Up Again,” she was clear about the appeal and its limits: “It’s a fetish. Fetish doesn’t necessarily mean sexual.” Her page bio made it simple: “Wizard warning: Will not do explicit sexual content. Might be in my underwear.”

In a Substack post at the time, Cave set a deadline and goals. “I’ll try for one year,” she wrote, planning to pay off debts, make the house safe, fix arsenic and lead in the wallpaper, and build a new roof. She described her choice as a reckoning, saying that she had “nothing to show for 18 years of work in the arts industry,” and told her podcast listeners that sharing her hair has been surprisingly “liberating” and “empowering.”

The project came at a price for her career. “I found out I didn’t get booked for a Harry Potter convention recently,” Cave wrote in Sept. 2025, saying that organizers claimed the event was family-oriented. She called the reasoning “baffling,” pointing out that performers, who still perform at such events, took roles with nudity or sex scenes, unlike her content. She also says that she now ranks among the platform’s top 1% earners.

She has been open about how long the arrangement can last, telling The Times that she feels like she has barely any time left as an earner because she won’t strip on her page.

“I don’t know how long I can last if I don’t start giving more,” she said. By her own admission, she can’t afford to stop, and while she likes a lot about her work, there’s plenty that she doesn’t.

Cave isn’t the first performer to discover that the platform can be more profitable than her main career. Last year, singer Lily Allen said that an account with pictures of her feet was earning more than her music streaming income, and Drea de Matteo of The Sopranos has thanked the site for helping her maintain her house.

Cave first appeared as Lavender Brown in 2009 and portrayed the character until the end of the series in 2011, also voicing the character in two Harry Potter video games. Among her other projects are Great Expectations, Black Mirror, Industry, and Tale of Tales.