Thu, October 1, 2026 at 6:14 AM UTC
Juliette Michele wasn’t allowed to watch “Harry Potter” growing up. Now the 28-year-old makes her living dressing as characters from the kinds of stories her church once kept off-limits.
Michele, who has more than 3 million Instagram followers under the handle @thejuliettemichele, said she was raised in a “super evangelical” household in Dallas where wizardry, Pokémon and many popular games and films were forbidden.
“I was not allowed to watch Harry Potter,” she said. “I only watched Harry Potter when I was an adult because that was super banned. Pokémon was banned. There were a lot of things that our church banned, so I wasn’t really allowed to do a lot.”
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As a child, she found ways around the restrictions, often spending time at a friend’s home where the rules were looser.
“I would always want to go over to my best friend’s house because her house was less strict,” Michele said. “We would play on the GameCube and I’d have to hide a lot of my interests.”
Her secret hobbies extended to collecting anime figures, which she began buying online in fifth grade. She sometimes used her grandmother’s credit card, with permission, and then hid the purchases at home.
“I’ve been collecting those since I was in fifth grade,” she said. “I would order them on eBay and hide them in my closet so my mom wouldn’t see. I actually got really internet savvy when I was quite young. That’s the way I got around a lot of things.”
Michele said her family’s efforts to shield her from pop culture backfired.
“I think that kind of just worked against what my family tried to do because they were trying to force me to be a very good Christian girl,” she said. “And I’m not really that.”
Around the same age she started collecting figures, Michele developed a crush on a girl, a realization she said her faith initially taught her to feel ashamed of.
“I just felt really bad about that because of my religion,” she said. “I always just thought, ‘Maybe I was built wrong or something.’ But then I was like, ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t choose your preference.'”
She described that period as “deconstructing that really hateful mindset that I was taught,” adding: “There are a lot of people like me that have gone through that, that have gotten out.”
Michele began making her own costumes in her early teens and started posting her cosplay online at 18. Her following grew steadily, and the hobby eventually became her full-time job.
Her relationship with her parents remains complicated.
“They’re very proud of how much money I make,” she said. “But we don’t really talk about it.”
