HBO’s Harry Potter TV series is slowly moving towards its biggest challenge – casting a new swathe of stars in the roles that they will inhabit for several years. This will include a lot of young actors taking on the part of the titular wizard and his Hogwarts classmates, and that comes with a complication of how the production will handle the inevitable aging of these actors quicker than their on-screen counterparts.
Many productions have seen young actors spending up to ten years playing long-term roles, while their characters have only aged a few, such as the original Harry Potter movies and Netflix’s Stranger Things. Even shows like Sex Education have stretched how believable it is having actors in their late 20s playing college students. For the new Harry Potter show, it looks like HBO have a plan to help combat some of the problems, and it is one that also means good news for those looking forward to the new iteration of J.K. Rowling’s novels.
According to Casey Bloys, HBO’s Chief Content Officer, there have been plenty of discussions about how the long-running series can tackle the challenge of keeping their young actors in line with their in-universe characters in terms of age, and it seems that part of the plan will be to fully invest in filming multiple seasons back to back. As per TVLine, Bloys explained:
“It is something we’re thinking about. One of the ideas we talked about was shooting the first season and the second season very close to each other time-wise, because 11 to 13 is a big jump in kids’ lives. You can get away with 13 to 15, something like that. So we’re going to have to think about scheduling and shooting so that they don’t grow too much between seasons. It is a consideration.”
Fans Are Mixed Over a New Harry Potter Adaptation
The original Harry Potter films were released between 2001 and 2011, before the franchise was expanded on with a trilogy of Fantastic Beasts movies. While there are many fans – and former Potter actors – who have questioned why the franchise is being rebooted just over a decade after the movies came to an end.
Outside the usual reason – great big piles of cash to be made – the biggest reason for the Harry Potter saga to get a reworking is due to how many of the novels ended up being cut to meet the acceptable run times of feature films when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was released over two decades ago. With the new series, it has been said that the plan is to adapt one book per season, which, for the first six novels in particular, will result in up to eight additional hours to tell each story.
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James and Oliver Phelps had some tongue-in-cheek words for whoever ends up playing George and Fred Weasley on the small screen.
There are, of course, many other reasons why the TV series could end up surpassing expectations. Despite not being a big screen movie, Warner Bros. will be heavily investing money into this and other big IP offerings, leading one to expect that there will be major advances in special effects compared to the early films. The new iteration also allows HBO to revisit some character designs that perhaps did not align exactly with the descriptions of the characters in the books – a bugbear that many readers face with any adaptation of novels they love.
However, the production does have a constant cloud hanging over it thanks to the frequent online spats between Potter creator J.K. Rowling and fans who do not share her views on the transgender community. While Rowling is involved in the new show, Warner Bros. has attempted to steer conversations away from the author’s controversies during press conferences, and will continue to walk that tightrope as the production really gets going next year.
- Release Date
- November 16, 2001
- Cast
- Daniel Radcliffe , Rupert Grint , Emma Watson , John Cleese , Robbie Coltrane , Warwick Davis , Richard Griffiths , Ian Hart , John Hurt , Alan Rickman , Fiona Shaw , Maggie Smith
- Runtime
- 152 Minutes
- Tagline
- Website
- Franchise
- Budget
- $125 Million
- Studio(s)
- Warner Bros. Pictures , Heyday Films , 1492 Pictures
- Distributor(s)
- Warner Bros. Pictures