Jessie Cave’s pregnancy story is not the sort of romance arc you’d pitch for a Harry Potter spin-off. The actor who played Lavender Brown, the lovestruck Gryffindor who clung to Ron Weasley – ended up with a real-life plot twist that started with a one-night stand at the Edinburgh Fringe, a missed connection, and a badly timed text from a moving train. Years later, on a recent episode of Have A Word podcast, the 38-year-old comedian, writer and newly minted OnlyFans creator walked listeners through the moment she had to tell that “one-night stand” she was four months pregnant with his child – over patchy 4G and a string of messages that arrived in the worst possible order.
From Fringe fling to “hiya, we need to talk”
The world first met Jessie Cave as Lavender Brown in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and the final two Deathly Hallows films, the over-keen girlfriend whose devotion to Ron became a running joke. Away from Hogwarts, she built a career on stand-up, solo shows and YouTube, where her comedy often mines the chaos of relationships and parenting. The man at the centre of this story, fellow comedian Alfie Brown, entered her life at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012. They moved in the same circuit for a while before, two years later, going on a date that ended in what she describes as an impromptu one-night stand. They went home together, then… didn’t see each other again. Four months later, she found out she was pregnant. “I didn’t tell him I was pregnant until I was four months pregnant,” Cave told the podcast. “I text him but I was on a train so the texts didn’t go through in the right order. “The first thing I text him was ‘hiya, we need to talk’. I didn’t want to be rejected because I needed him to talk.” According to her, he twigged almost immediately, replying to ask whether she was “pregnant or diseased” – a line that now plays as grimly funny, but at the time was hardly the reassurance she was looking for. She pressed on anyway, trying to get the words out as clearly as she could. “I text back, ‘look, I didn’t want to tell you this way, but I’m pregnant, and I’m 16 weeks along. I’m calling it Bam. And it’s a boy.’” Then the train signal intervened. “The scan photo was the thing that went through first. All he gets is the scan photo of this human that he’s made, and then the other texts just don’t go through for like an hour. I had to tell him by text in the end.” No sit-down conversation. No café summit. Just an unsolicited scan photo and, an hour later, the rest of the explanation catching up over a temperamental connection. By rights, that could have been the beginning and end of their story – an awkward, modern parable about timing and contraception. But it wasn’t. Cave gave birth to a son, whom they named Donnie rather than the working title “Bam”. Brown stepped up, by her account being “great” with her, and the two moved from accidental co-parents to an actual relationship. They’ve been together, on and off, since 2014. Another child, Margot, followed in 2016, then two more: Abraham in 2020 and Becker in 2022. Cave has described their set-up as a “famously chaotic” partnership that has survived two splits, four children and a career built on oversharing; somehow, they keep circling back. Brown, for his part, is very much a known quantity in British stand-up. The son of composer Steve Brown and impressionist Jan Ravens, he started performing in 2006 and became a regular presence at the Edinburgh Fringe with sharply observational, often deliberately provocative material. He’s had his own controversies – in 2023 an old clip resurfaced of him using a racial slur, prompting a public apology in which he said he had long regretted the “wrongful and hurtful” remark. Even so, he remains a critical favourite: in 2022 he was nominated for an Edinburgh Comedy Award, won a Chortle Best Show, and has been described by The List as “the future of British stand-up”. It is, in other words, not a quiet household.
From Hogwarts alum to hair-fetish niche and four kids
While most people still recognise Cave first as Lavender Brown – the girl who doodled “Ron + Lavender” in hearts – her career and life since Deathly Hallows wrapped in 2011 have spanned a lot more than Potter conventions. She has written and performed her own shows, published illustrated books, and built a following online for her frank, slightly frazzled take on motherhood. In March 2025, she added another, more surprising line to the CV: OnlyFans creator. Cave “shocked fans”, as several headlines put it, when she announced she was joining the subscription platform “to help pay off her debts”. But anyone expecting explicit content was quickly corrected. Her page, she explained, is about “hair stuff” – making the “best quality hair sounds” and “very sensual stuff” centred around her long hair rather than anything X-rated. One of the more talked-about videos involved her drenching her hair in strawberry milk. It is niche, certainly, but it has worked. She has described it as a deliberate financial decision, taken after turning down reality TV options such as I’m A Celebrity…, and has said she plans to treat it as a finite project, staying on the platform for roughly a year rather than indefinitely. That practical streak sits alongside a clear sense of where she finds meaning. For all the attention on Potter, OnlyFans and podcast clips, Cave repeatedly circles back to the same two pillars: comedy and motherhood. Those are the worlds that brought her to Brown, even if the first chapter involved a delayed text and a badly timed scan photo.
