Daniel Radcliffe May Have Just Settled A Decades-Old 'Harry Potter' Mystery

No matter how many times J. K. Rowling tweets some surprising new detail about the wizarding world, there will always be more mysteries Harry Potter fans will try to puzzle out. Thankfully, Daniel Radcliffe just offered a solid response to one of the questions that has been plaguing the fandom for years. And TBH, Daniel Radcliffe's explanation of how Quirrell slept in Harry Potter is the perfect mix of silly and actually sensible.

Alongside all the deep, philosophical questions Harry Potter superfans raise about the series, there has always been a number of practical questions over the years as well. I mean, remember when J. K. Rowling laid out the unexpected way wizards use the bathroom? Well, one of these more random questions that has come up ever since the release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone concerns how Professor Quirrell slept at night. The climax of that first book and movie revealed Quirrell had been hiding Voldemort's face on the back of his noggin, and detail-oriented superfans quickly wondered how a sleeping arrangement would work with faces on both sides of a head.

The question received a bigger spotlight in the fandom when the viral videos of A Very Potter Musical were released on YouTube in 2009, which featured a song in which Quirrell and Voldemort argued over how they would sleep.

Now, fans have an answer straight from Harry Potter himself. Radcliffe is reuniting with Quirrell actor Ian Hart for the upcoming prison-break thriller Escape from Pretoria, and HuffPost took the opportunity to ask the star his opinion on the matter:

I would say that the only practical thing to do there would be to sleep on your side, unless Voldemort doesn’t need air, which I’m not sure. As long as there’s breath coming into the body, he’s probably asleep on his front because it would still circulate around the whole thing. I’m guessing back-of-the-head Voldemort could survive off front-of-the-head Ian Hart’s air supply.

Radcliffe definitely took the question a step further than most fans, who would probably just be content with to say that Quirrell slept on his side while Voldemort's face was on his head. According to Racliffe's reasoning, Quirrell could just lie down on his back like usual without worrying about suffocating Voldemort, since the parasitic face likely did not need to breathe on its own.

Still, it feels out of character imagining Voldemort allowing himself to be squashed into a pillow for eight hours a night (assuming Quirrell maintained healthy sleep habits). I personally think the arrangement may be the opposite of what Radcliffe suggested, with Voldemort's face up and Quirrell being forced to sleep face-down. All fans can do now is hope J. K. Rowling sees Radcliffe's theory and decides to tweet out Quirrell's canonical sleeping position, because the world needs the truth.