Nikolai Posleda has never attended the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. His aunt and uncle never trapped him in the cupboard under the stairs, and he never led a successful rebellion against the most evil and powerful dark wizard in history.
That’s because Nikolai Posleda is not Harry Potter — but he looks almost exactly like Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who portrayed the boy wizard in eight blockbuster films.
Posleda lives in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, where he says locals started comparing him to Harry Potter about five years ago, just after the film series wrapped up in 2011 with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.”
On Instagram, nearly every one of Posleda's selfies draws dozens of comments from people screaming about Harry Potter.
In an interview with the website TJournal, Posleda said that he is told about his resemblance to Harry Potter on a daily basis. “Most of the time,” he said, “people walk by and say to each other something like — wow — look, it’s Harry Potter! Sometimes they want to take a picture, but not too often, thank God. They don’t ask for my autograph, but a couple of times people have started speaking English with me.”
Posleda describes himself as a big fan of J. K. Rowling’s books, saying he’s read the whole Harry Potter saga several times, and seen all the movies more than once, though he confesses that “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” was his least favorite installment.
The resemblance to Radcliffe’s Harry Potter has paid off in other ways, too, Posleda told TJournal. “Big Yorker,” a local fast food chain in Krasnoyarsk, actually hired him to be the face of the company in advertisements.
Nikolai Posleda isn’t Russia’s first Hollywood lookalike to make waves online. Last year, a security guard named Roman Burtsev gained notoriety as “Fat Leonardo DiCaprio,” after being discovered by Internet users. Burtsev didn’t let the resemblance go to waste, either, and he later starred in a promotional video for a Russian television station, and then in a commercial for “Five Lakes” vodka.
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