HBO’s Harry Potter series finds its Dobby, its Ginny and its teenage dark lord (TV news).
HBO has filled three of the more consequential vacancies on its Harry Potter adaptation, confirming that Lenny Rush will play Dobby, Bonnie Hill will play Ginny Weasley and Billy Barratt will play Tom Riddle when the show returns for a second season. All three are booked for the ‘Chamber of Secrets’ year, which is to say the year in which all three of those characters stop being scenery and start being the plot.
Rush is the headline. At fourteen he became the youngest performer ever to win a BAFTA TV Award for comedy, for ‘Am I Being Unreasonable?’, and has since turned up in ‘Dodger’, ‘Enola Holmes 2’ and a rather good ‘Doctor Who’ special opposite David Tennant. He has also spent most of his short career politely pointing out that disabled actors can carry a show rather than decorate one, which makes his casting as the wizarding world’s most famous indentured servant either delicious or pointed, depending on how much you want to think about it. In the films Dobby was a bundle of polygons with Toby Jones’ voice attached; here he is a performer with a BAFTA and, presumably, a motion-capture suit. Note also that Warwick Davis is already aboard as Flitwick, having played both Flitwick and Griphook in the original films, so Leavesden now contains at least two actors who have out-lasted the entire franchise.
Barratt gets the trickier job. Tom Riddle in book two is a sixteen-year-old memory bleeding out of a diary, charming enough that a lonely eleven-year-old hands him her whole year, and menacing enough that the reveal still lands three decades on. Barratt has form: he won an International Emmy at fifteen for ‘Responsible Child’, the youngest ever to do so, and has since done time in ‘Invasion’, ‘Kraven the Hunter’ and the deeply unpleasant (complimentary) ‘Bring Her Back’. Whether HBO is casting a one-season guest or quietly auditioning its long-term Voldemort is the question nobody at Warner Bros will answer for about four years.
Hill’s casting is a recast rather than a debut. Gracie Cochrane played Ginny in season one and stepped away afterwards, her family citing “unforeseen circumstances” — a phrase doing a great deal of work — leaving the role open at precisely the moment the character becomes load-bearing. Hill, whose credits include ‘The Six Triple Eight’ and ‘Film Club’, inherits a Ginny who spends most of the second book being written about rather than written, then turns out to have been the engine of the entire thing. Good luck to her; it is the sort of part that either gets overlooked or gets a decade of screen time, with very little in between.
The series proper arrives first. ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ runs eight episodes and lands on HBO and HBO Max on Christmas Day, with Dominic McLaughlin as Harry, Arabella Stanton as Hermione, Alastair Stout as Ron, John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu as Snape and Nick Frost as Hagrid. Kit Harington has already been announced as Gilderoy Lockhart, a piece of casting that suggests somebody at HBO has a sense of humour about Jon Snow’s back catalogue. Francesca Gardiner writes and executive produces, Mark Mylod directs multiple episodes, and the executive producer roster includes J.K. Rowling, Neil Blair and Ruth Kenley-Letts for Brontë Film and TV alongside David Heyman for Heyday Films — Rowling’s presence remaining, as ever, the part of the press release that generates more column inches than the eight episodes it is attached to.
Season two shoots this autumn, ahead of season one even reaching a screen, which tells you how much appetite Warner Bros has for a gap between instalments. The stated plan is a decade of television, one book per season, with the children ageing in real time. Dobby, of course, will not age at all. Nice work if you can get it.
